Today's article at Bruce Clay was about avoiding a PR nightmare. He rightly suggests that the easiest way is to be smart and not get into one in the first place, which is easy advice, but then he knocks one out of the park by giving a 1-2 punch to the most human of impulses, retaliation:

1. Refrain from personal attacks. At all costs. There are no exceptions.
2. Refrain from responding to personal attacks. At all costs. There are no exceptions.

Not content to summarize a Dali Lamaesque ("We are not anti-China, we are pro-Tibet" - how clean is that?) truth clearly, he goes on to give you a good physical marker you can use to guide yourself:

As a general rule, if your hands are shaking after you have finished typing out your five page rebuttal to their argument, DO NOT PRESS PUBLISH.

Perfect.

Politics

Not the politics of the personal, which is what the above is all about, but the politics of, er, politics. For example, I was using Brian Schaler's Digg Status tool and got an interesting error message.

I'm not sure if he's kidding about how people complain about Bush on Digg or is encouraging people to complain about Bush on Digg.

It doesn't matter, but the possibility of offending a large number of people is certainly present.

Around here we have the usual mix of big-L and little-l libertarians, democrats, liberals, conservatives, and republicans. I think we even have a communist and an economist. But our ironclad rule is:

1. No politics while you're representing the company

If a client brings up politics we are polite (no matter how much we agree or thing he's crazy) and move right along.

I have an English friend (nu-Labor if you follow that stuff) who finds American's willingness to talk politics at work with customers appalling. I think I agree with him.