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Anon is Illiterate
(retrolemmy.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
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I read a lot of science fiction, and a younger friends at work frequently asked me for recommendations, and he liked talking about the books after reading them. At some point I found out that he exclusively consumes them as audiobooks, which is fine and I didn't think much about it. Some years down the line, when I was getting ready to retire, I had to pass on things to him. There was enough of it that, in addition to working elbow-to-elbow with him, I documented all the details in some long emails. When we meet, I'd say "The details are in the email," and focus on explaining the big picture.
It became obvious that he never read the emails. When I talked to him about it, he admitted that he really struggles with any long block of text. The guy is really smart, and he knows a lot about a lot of things, but he gets all his info from audio and video because struggles to consume text. There's clearly some kind of learning/mental issue going on there. It's going to make the job tough for him, but I hope he works it out.
They found a way to learn that works for them. As someone that almost always prefer text, I understand why you feel this way but you must have realized that most people prefer this format. And as far as I can tell, so long as they can read an email when it's important (which they'll learn one way or another), it will be fine.
He's been working at the company for more than 15 years and still struggles to read any significant block of text, so I'm worried for him. It's not that he prefers audio, it's that text is a real problem for him.
And don't misunderstand me: I'm the guy's biggest cheerleader; I very much want him to succeed and am happy with any viable workaround he finds. I'm not pushing any sort of personal bias on him. The company works with a lot of text.
At my last job I managed a team of coders in India. They absolutely, categorically refused to ever read anything that I wrote to them, no matter what the situation. I had to maintain a 4AM-noon schedule just so I could have realtime interactions with them at least part of my day and give them instructions verbally. To their credit, they didn't really listen to what I said much, either.
I still wonder whether it was a side effect of being able to speak English but not being able to read and write it very well, or whether they were consciously trying to avoid having any paper trail that they could be held accountable for.