I’m not opposed to people asking questions. Not at all. For example “Does the sushi place next to McDonald’s have decent fish rolls?” is not a bad question when asked of a person who regularly visits that particular shop. ”Does the 109 go down Victoria Street?” is also a reasonable question to ask if you know that somebody in the office is a user of public transport. Also “What do you feel like for lunch?”. Perfectly sensible question.
It’s just that there are people who ask questions when they should be pretty confident that the answer is not going to be common knowledge and that the person they have asked will have to do some research in order to provide an answer. There are scenarios in which this type of question is acceptable, however a lot of the time these questions are asked by people who are either
- sitting in front of a computer at the time of asking, or
- asking the question via the internet.
This is where www.lmgtfy.com comes in handy.
Here’s how it works. Somebody emails you/tweets/facebooks (is that even a thing? Let’s assume it is) a question such as “Where do lemurs come from?”. Now, the querier is clearly hoping that somebody reading the question will provide the answer. Don’t do it! Go to Let me google that for you and type in a the query where do lemurs come from. Then copy the link that is generated.
Have a look at the comments on this brief David Sedaris article to see how it can work for you, even when dealing with complete strangers…
That is excellent.
Injera
none of what you suggest is necessary. All you need is to refer them to Mad’s “snappy answers to those stupid questions” for a yank publication even i had to “dip me lid “to it
Did you use it to ask what marmalade to get? BTW I had to read the post twice to understand it that is how IT fucked I am.