In another forum, Andy (a GE commenter) asked:

Why me, Lord?
What did I ever do?
That caused you to make people touch my monitor?

Leaving aside the religious debates about suffering and God’s will and suchlike, let’s simply address it as an etiquette question.
Don’t touch other people’s monitors.
It’s that simple. Just don’t. If you have to [...]

A quick welcome to 100+ readers via LiveJournal’s syndicated feed. I’m damned_colonial over there if you happen to have any interest in my other obsessions and/or the minutiae of my daily life.
Speaking of my daily life, right now I’m in the throes of packing to move around the world, and my article on how [...]

If geek workplaces have a dress code at all (and many don’t have an explicit one), it’s usually stated as “business casual”. Business casual is also, supposedly, the appropriate wear for interviews at tech companies, meetings, trade shows, and the other not-bashing-at-a-keyboard parts of many geek jobs. What that actually means, however…
Business casual [...]

It’s hard not to feel like an enormous fraud writing this blog, when in my last two performance reviews at work, I’ve been dinged pretty hard for lack of social skills.
I just know that next time I’m out in public I’m going to make some ghastly gaffe, and someone’s going to tease me [...]

On the weekend I had lunch with a group of not-particularly-geeks. I mean, they might be geeks in their own fields, but they’re not the computery open-sourcey Perly type that I usually talk about geeky stuff with. So over our pho (I had the satay beef egg noodle soup, which was pretty tasty) [...]

Your workplace doesn’t have a dress code. Or so you think.
In reality, there are a bunch of hidden rules for personal grooming and appearance, and people — not everyone, admitedly, but some non-zero proportion of the population — expect you to follow them. Sometimes the rules are sensible, sometimes they’re arbitrary, but they [...]

An anonymous correspondent writes:

I may need to resign my current position soon; I’m employed as a web developer by a rather shall we say parsimonious firm and have good prospects for an offer at better pay from a different firm. As I am planning my exit, I’m realizing I’ve never needed to write a resignation [...]

Used to be that business letters were simple. You (or your secretary) typed them on your manual typewriter, beginning “Dear Sir,” and followed a simple formula as laid out in various handbooks of business communications.
Email’s less formal, we all know that. And in completely informal situations, we all know how to use it [...]

I’m your host, Kirrily Robert, often called Skud, and I’ll be posting articles on etiquette for geeks.
No, seriously.
And don’t tell me it’s not needed. Just look around you.
So why Geek Etiquette? What’s special about us?
The vast majority of your basic etiquette book — Emily Post or what have you — is [...]

I honestly can’t believe I need to explain this to adults: DO NOT TALK ABOUT POO IN THE WORKPLACE.