Janet Baraclough wrote:
The message
from Pennyaline contains these words:

In less than an hour, this message from madgardner has been posted by
three people. So they're having an outbreak of overkill in Faerie Holler
now?
Please. Please. I understand that some of you like to read her posts,
but must we paper the joint with them? Once is enough.

Save the paper for mopping up your incontinence problem.

. At the time I posted a copy of Maddie's email to the group, no group
duplicates had been downloaded on my screen, obviously the same was true
of the other two posters. The next time I updated, their copies
appeared. They appear in three separate threads because none of us was
aware of what the others were doing. We live in different countries,
use different isps and news servers, so our posts are propagated round
usenet groups in different time zones and routes. That's the nature of
the medium. It's like putting a letter in the postbox to send it across
the world, and being unable to control what time the postman delivers
it, or what time the recipient will get home to read it.


I'm not blaming each person who posted it. I'm blaming the individual
who asked multiple people to post it for her. Why it was necessary for
her to have three people put it up is a puzzler. But it fits right in
with her protracted announcements and updates about her pending absence
from newsgroups, as though she *had* to explain that she wouldn't be
"here," as though something might abort if she didn't keep us abreast of
the sturm und drang, or if we didn't notice.

So it actually is not analogous to just mailing a letter, and it cannot
be blamed on variances in time and space and the speed of message
propagation across the 'net. It's like mailing three letters, each
promising the recipient that he or she is the only one and could they do
this favor, with the only end result of importance being that the sender
reappears, briefly, still a victim of circumstances and relying on the
kindness of strangers... perhaps Maddie DuBois should try the library to
get to a newsreader, or a friend's house.

Many thanks to those who responded to my post and revealed their own
incontinence.