Annoying emailers are prevalent in the
corporate work force. Beware.
Working in a corporate job requires frequent use of email. As a result, "normal" employees have to deal with a variety of highly annoying coworkers who don't understand or accept the social norms of work email.
Below are seven habits that consistently appear at offices across the world. If you have additional examples, please feel free to provide them in the comments below.
1. Including email signatures that include credentials like "MBA" or "HRMS" after their name. Existing readers are well aware of the distaste for credentials in email signatures as described in "Email Signatures: Adding "MBA" after your name is very telling".
2. Adding clipart to your email. Often the work of administrative assistants, human resources, or other corporate cheerleaders. To think that when these people attach the clipart they imagine recipients smiling. This is called reputation distortion. Those who think others believe them to be a cheery person are actually the people most despised by the office. Clipart photos are to corporate cheerleaders as rainbows are to the GLBT. Immediate and universal identification.
3. Excessive use of smiley faces and exclamation points or other repetitive punctuation?!!!? The culprit is usually a young female. At some point from 1987 on through 2000, elementary schools taught young girls the art of expressing themselves through massive amounts of punctuation. One exclamation point means you're just a little excited. Five exclamation points is absolute elation. These people spend the better part of their life behind three question marks. Side note: If email contained a way to replace the dot on a lowercase "i" with a heart, these people would eat it up like their flashy emoticons.
4. Including a vcard attachment in your email. Receiving a vCard attachment is the equivalent to someone playing "The only thing that looks good on me is you" by Bryan Adams in 2009. It sucked in 1996 and quite frankly it's amazing it still exists in 2009.
5. Religious usage of 'high importance' or 'read receipt' functionality. Perhaps the worst of all habits of annoying emailers, the consistent and unnecessary usage of high importance emails is a huge problem among project management types. Eventually the office becomes numb to any sort of elevated importance and the purpose of elevating an email's importance is lost organization-wide. The next time you receive an unnecessary 'high importance' email, respond back to them with this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf. On a slightly less annoying but more big brotherish level, the read receipt is a virtual slap in the face. If you cannot trust that someone will read your email you might as well pack up your things and get a new job, because you have issues that go far deeper than any coworker can solve.
6. Sending large attachments instead of using shared server or at least zipping the file. The technotarded crowd has a very difficult time understanding the concept of providing a link to a shared file. In the eyes of a technotard, email is just like snail mail. If they were to show you a document, the document needs to be physically present in the snail mail. It cannot simply refer you to the place where the document exists. Even worse, the technotard is completely unaware of what "zipping" a file means. To the technotard, WinZip, or even the now built-in functionality of compressing files is something in which you should rely on IT professionals.
7. treatng email like txt mssg and end sbjct line w/ eom. Most often done by young professionals who somehow found a way to turn email subject lines into Twitter. Even more annoying is ending a message with "eom" or "end of message" as if to suggest that in the future they may send you multiple emails which are completely encapsulated in the limited space of a subject line. Perhaps even more disturbing are the 30-50 year old employees who believe it's "the next big thing" and start sending subject-only emails to make sure they don't fall behind the curve.
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'Seven Habits' is a recurring article appearing in Dudley B. Dawson's Life in the Cubicle column at completely random moments.
View the Seven Habits of: Highly Effective Slackers | Highly Annoying Emailers | Disrespectful Work Poopers | Morbidly Obese Coworkers | Typical Bad Managers | Highly Effective Interns | Defective Conference Call Leaders | Incapable Technotards | Highly Anal Employees | Highly Arrogant Employees | Highly Disengaged Employees
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Comments
8. People who don't actually work - they just forward emails on to people that do work. Usually done by 99% of all managers in the entire universe.
9. Replying to all. Usually done by the dumb employees which excludes 5% of the people you work with. Usually turns into a chain of 700 emails having nothing to do with you. It usually continues for 2-3 hours before an executive or someone with cojones tells everyone to quit replying to all. It stops but within two days these same people start a new chain of reply to alls and the cycle continues.
10. People who think that all that e-mailing really matters. Imagine all the useless e-mails that circulated around the offices at Enron, Bear-Stearns,Goldman Sachs, etc. Didn't help that they all probably used correct grammar, did it?
11. As Dudley pointed out in one of his first articles, people who end emails with "Please advise". Usually the work of people that have no idea how to spell as it usually comes out "Please advice." These people cost companies millions of dollars a year as they not only waste time getting in the way but create unnecessary work for the people giving them "advise".
12. Forwarding NSFW stuff from your work email to my work email. Perhaps you've heard of gmail or the antiquated hotmail?
Annoying e-mail habits? Ow man! Here's my list:
12. Using half a resume as a signature (5+ lines is way too much)
13. Using HTML-mail to force some strange unpleasant color scheme, font type or custom layout
14. Typing the message in a attached word document instead of the message body
15. Replying with the complete original mail in the reply. I send you the message, you do not have to repeat all of it, just repeat the minimum the readers will need to understand which part you responding to. And know they've received the previous mail(s) too. If you have less than 60% of own text, you're quoting way too much.
you never need to qoute anything out of even earlier messages. No really, never.
16. People who write their reply into the original text on hard to spot ways, for example not using "> " in front of quoted text and write their own additions in dark blue text.
17. people who write their response first, then quote the thing they are responding to, below it. This doesn't read logical.
You should write:
> what is your name?
Tom
> how old are you?
25
instead of:
Tom
> what is your name?
25
> how old are you?
or:
Tom
25
> what is your name?
> how old are you?
Are you writing me a message or a puzzle?
18. Including everybody and everything that might have a slight interest in the matter. including more than 4 people is a guaranteed way of never getting the subject closed.
19. including all addresses they know of you in every mail to you. Your address might be fred.flinstone@some-company.com and for typo-sake might also receive the mail sent to fredflinstone@somecompany.com and dozens of other permutations, maybe you have a second (set of) addresses because you work via a subcontractor, and maybe somehow they got hold of your private address. Now they include all addresses they know, so you get every message 10+ times.
20. People who forward some "important message they don't fully understand" to their whole address book because the message told them to warn as many people as possible about the subject.
21. People who don't know the difference between the TO, CC and BCC fields. You guys should not be allowed on the internet.
22. Using "This message might me confidential. if you're not the intended recipient, please don't read this message and contact me"-signatures.
Nobody in their right mind would dare include a disclaimer like that on their paper mail correspondence, but it seems almost standard corporate policy to include it in every e-mail.
It shows disrespect, disinterest and carelessness. And you want me to read (and maybe even respond to) your e-mail?
If you can't be bothered to check the correct addressing on a confidential message you're going to send out unencrypted, why should I be held responsible? And why add this to the END of the message?
These stupid signatures will make me post your message on the most public place I can find and add the question "can someone please confirm if I'm the intended recipient?"
Or if I'm to busy for this, you'll at least get a reply "Please check if I'm the recipient you intended yourself. If so, please re-send me the mail without the preposterous disclaimer. For now, I've deleted the mail unread, as requested"
23. Managers who demand to be kept informed on a daily/hourly basis of the procedings, but never read those mails. Managers who demand a meeting program never comment on them before the meeting and in the first 3 minutes of the meeting think up what they want to discuss.
If you demand certain mails, at least read them. Show some respect to the people who do your work for you.
And can we include mailing lists?
24. Mailing list which require you to register (or follow some weird/tricky procedure) first before you can unsubscribe
x+1:
People sending me a completely warped, distorted, mangled end unreadable message (because it all the reasons mentioned here, it has been going round 25+ recipients with crazy signatures, crazy formatting, quote-on-quote-on-quote for over a month or so) where the last 3 people it passed by just added: please help/solve/support/take care of this.
x+2:
Not updating subject, just letting the "RE: RE: RE: FWD: RE:" add up
x+3:
Not including a subject at all
Roland - thanks for the unbelievable number of annoyances. You are one bitter son of a beech.
I believe that puts the next comment at #30.
30. People who have no concept of time zones and send repetitive emails wondering why you won't answer them.
-Are you available to speak in an hour?
-Hello, are you in?
-I need to speak with you urgently.
NO, I'm not in you jerk. Its nine thirty at night and now I'm at home and since I'm not being paid to be at home, I'm not working from there.
People who send one liners like "Read below and let me know if you can help?" They expect you to read though chain of emails and don't care to summarize or analyze themselves.
32. People who forward all their emails to everyone - even if we have nothing to do we the original sent email (which loads my email with trash and sometimes emails that say "confidential", important, etc.). Often they will forward emails that they were forwarded back to their original sender, who, if there are 2 such people will keep on forwarding to each other and everyone back and forth. Very similar to #9 - manager hollers to stop and it stops for a few hours; only to restart again when a new set of emails arrive.
Bosses who micro manage and demand to be Cced on everything. Then, after countless in-person meetings where decisions have been made and strategy has been changed they go back to an old email as the Bible and the cycle resumes.
33) The coworker or boss that marks an email as "follow-up later" on their calendar. The follow-up date is always over a month later. You more than likely emailed them the resolution a day, and sometimes even minutes, after the original email.
The worst is when you email someone and they respond with "thanks" or "okay" or "sounds great". Why bother emailing that back?
Once again Dudley shows his shovenist side and makes fun of only women for using punctuation. Quite obvious that Dudley B. Dawson will live alone the rest of his life.
What's worse than having MBA after your name? How about the school name in front of it!
EX: Mr. Joe Shmuck, Wharton MBA
I would also like to complain about the (R) or (TM) after letters like somebody is going to falsly claim to have them!
Hey Jill,
Dudley gets all the ladies.
Thanks,
Blue Horseshoe, MBA, PhD, MHR, ARCS (TM), OBMF.
One more, sorry.
How about the mortgage brokers and others who have a paragraph after their name saying something like, "the best compliment you can give me is a referral".
Go get your own damn referrals!
The posting and the comments seem to be right out of the 80s and early 90s. I read similar comments 25 years ago. One thing that I found then was the the people who most objected to Email also objected to any from of communication. Tey were the ones who worked on the failed projects because they refused to listen to the advice of others.
Imagine objecting to HTML formatted Email. Perhaps somebody has a text-only Email client. Perhaps they should move forward from 1980 and join the world in which the WWW exists.
Inagine someone not compressing an attachment. Hard drives have gone beyond 10 megabytes about 20 years or so ago. Perhaps Winzip is more troubke than it is worth. Perhaps the virus filter will delete zipped attachments. The same comment would go for providing links to shared drives istead of attachments
Emails I get from customers who are asking delivery questions are cc'd to their many bosses. Are you trying to scare me? I don't care what your boss thinks! He's your boss. You should have ordered your stuff from my company leaving enough time for delivery. You messed up, not me.
Another dreaded email is the charity plea. We are having a fundraiser for our annual picnic. Please donate 4 movie tickets, or a gift basket... blah blah blah. I get way too many of these at work. If one of our customers is having an annual picnic - why do I have to pay for it?
My favorite annoying e-mail habit: Including a message along the lines of "Consider the environment and think before you print this e-mail."
- People who see e-mail as a way of furthering their career...
- People who insist on copying every man and his dog when sending an e-mail. These are usally the people who raise concerns or ask questions about insignificant things, but try to make out they are really important. Like, has anyone analysed disk usage on the server (which has 1TB of space) to ensure there's space for the log files (which are 5KB each).
- People who sit next to you, but insist on e-mailing a question instead of just opening their stupid mouth and asking. These are often people who copy all and sundry, and ask questions like the above one in order to make people think they're doing your job for you.
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