One of my pet peeves lately is people asking silly or unrelated questions to the wrong place, not because it makes sense, but because it’s easy and the questioner is lazy.

Let me give you a specific example; a self-proclamed “freelance writer” (using a Hotmail account and a GeoCities website, no less) sent in a posting to the Internet OTR Digest (a confirmed opt-IN mailing list devoted to discussing Old-Time Radio) asking how one could find a specific date given a month and week. Yes, of course, we call that a “perpetual calendar,” and ignoring the ancient plastic one in my desk drawer that can be “dialed” to any year and month, there are a bazillion of them sitting around on the Internet waiting to be used.

So, we have someone who you would assume (mistakenly, apparently) had some rudimentary research skills asking a non-sequeter question to thousands of people on an Internet discussion list. Why?

That’s simple; because out of the thousands, someone would know and tell him, and it would save him the trouble of having to actually expend the energy of looking it up himself. Ignore the plain truth that I am certain it took me less time to do a Google search than it took him literally to type in the question, he was still too lazy to bother doing it himself. (It also immediately calls into legitimate question anything he writes…if he is this painfully unskilled in research, how accurate can any of it be?)
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