Goodbye to all that

It's been on my mind to leave the mentors for some time. I got into a fight with another mentor yesterday, and even made a post on this blog before I had cooled down, which I later deleted. I hadn't said anything too horrible, but I just knew that I'd broken the first law of blogging: if anything raises your blood pressure by more then twenty points, sleep on it before you put fingers to keyboard.

So apologies to my two readers: I know removing posts is verboten in most blogging circles but... oh well, this is my blog, and if you can't delete posts on your own blog, you might as well be being paid squillions to write what a company wants you to write, lol.

I once got told off for putting lol into a blog post. I can do that here, too. LOL. Ha!

Anyway, later in the day yet another notecard came from the powers that be in the VTeam for mentors, and suddenly I realised that I just couldn't go on fighting the rising tide of bureacracy and rules and regulations which they are constructing. I think it is completely different from the mentoring group I joined, they have brought in a hierarchy of some-mentors-are-better-than-others, rather than allowing experience to speak for itself, and I think they are turning it into something i don't want to be bothered with any more.

My criticism of what is happening stands: I think that there is no replacement for having questions and answers dealt with in chat before your eyes, and they can institute any number of hoops for new mentors to jump, but that induction still taught the mentors more than anything else. When there was a problem with group IMs that meant you couldn't cancel out of the chats, I could understand why people were so vociferous about stopping dialogue, but now that it IS possible to cancel out again, I think it is a mistake.

Making people IM answers to a question asked in open chat is the worst option - it means the person has to handle a lot of incoming mail, and may still not get the answer required, and meanwhile anyone else who might have benefitted from the answer has either to add to the mail the questioner received, or let it pass. in the old days, the people who couldn't help or didn't want to could cancel out of the chat, and leave those who had the answer or wanted the answer to continue.

Anyway, it has been on my mind that my only contributions recently have been to angrily close the chat when somebody has prevented any discussion about a legitimate question, and to post angry comments about that, so I left. I just left the mentor group and the Mentor Q and A group, and let it slip into the past. Frankly I think my life will be quieter and less stressful as a result.