Hello, this is your operator, you have a call from “bobwehadababyitsaboy”
do you accept the charges?
Then why not just use email? Sounds like you just want an email…
I don’t get why people don’t use email for lots of things. Most of the stuff that Facebook does for you can be done with email.
I don’t use email because it’s the absolute worst UX ever developed. I don’t think there was a single email provider that lays the messages out in a way I would like them laid out, i.e. in descending order, oldest to newest, with the newest on the bottom just like it’s a text exchange. So I can follow the conversation.
Plus it gets really confusing if they start adding other people into the conversation halfway through. I don’t see that conversation because it’s a separate communique, and then they try and merge the two together and then I get a big long list, suddenly, of 5 days worth of messages, interspersed with my own messages to them, except now they’re all out of sequence.
For all of its many many faults, at least Teams is actually visually coherent.
Plus of course I don’t need that email signature telling me not to print the email at the end of every message, literally no one in the history of the human races ever printed an email so they don’t need to tell me not to do it.
I work in municipal government and had a enginee4ing consultant Teams me a comment about a developer being a bumbass while I was screen-sharing to a live public meeting that involved that developer.
Please give me the “hey”
I think you can hide message previews now, but dang lol.
Don’t ever share your main desktop. Share individual windows or a secondary monitor.
If they’re just making a request, why not put it in an email instead of chatting with you?
Not really Instant Message necessary at all.
similarly frustrating: a voicemail that just says “call me”
On my way home tonight, sitting at a red light I noticed that my bosses boss sent me “hi, can you talk?”
I spent the next 20 minutes of the ride home trying to think of anything that I said to anybody that could have been misconstrued into God knows what. I get home and reply “I can now.”
It was a question someone had about our specific uniforms (scrubs) and under which heading I was able to order them under.
“Hi, can you talk? I have a question about your uniform.” Would have been so much kinder lol.
I swear bosses do this intentionally. It gets brought up so often in various places that it would be impossible not to understand the effect it has on their employees, and they get off on it.
I notice there are several similar domains by now. I know a few people who have this is the forever status message in the work messaging tool
Imagine calling someone on the phone, going hello! then putting them on hold…
My sister actually does this. I feel like it should be some sort of prank or social experiment, but I fear it’s not.
I looked at the other ones; I think that nohello.club might be a bit more useful, in a catching-flies-with-honey kinda way.
Do you think the people that send junk like “hi” or “quick chat?” get annoyed when they’re the recipient? Or they just think it’s normal?
They are the 80% that do 20% of the labor.
They’re quite content sitting around staring mindlessly at their monitor.
I refuse to play that game. People learn; either to message correctly or to leave me alone.
Just hit them back with a different conversation than the one they wanted to have. I find" hi how’s your day going?" isn’t tangential enough, but if you know who they are then might try ask something a bit more personalised or even try and offload one of your problems onto them.
Chaotic good
It’s a handshake. If you’re out of the office or otherwise can’t respond, it saves them from typing the whole message, they can do it only if they know you’re responding.
It’s still offloading the inconvenience to you a bit, but at least it’s rational for themThere is literally a feature to see if someone is out of office or not.
And even if that is set wrong, they can copy and paste the same question to someone else if you don’t respond. Doesn’t take any extra work.
You assume that everyone is replaceable and you can just message whatever to whomever.
Then we’re back to just send the whole request and I’ll get to it when I get to it. “Hi” is worthless in every scenario.
The objectively correct from a selfish perspective here, is to send “ping” and only type out the whole request if you respond. Yeah, it will make you wait, but it will save me time and mental effort at typing all that, knowing that it’s all for nothing if you will not respond in time.
The correct answer here is to do “Hi, need to talk to you about [thing], are you available right now?”, but it’s technically speaking only one step above this hateful “Hi”The objectively correct way is to send all the detail you have about the request so that the person fulfilling it has to ask as few follow-up questions as possible. This is the most time efficient way for everyone. If that person is unavailable then you either wait for them or copy paste to the next person. Being selfish doesn’t make sense when you’re the one that needs them to do something for you. If someone starts a communication with me with “ping” I’m not responding to that ever, if they follow up with what they want they’ll still be at the bottom of my list. That shit is disrespectful as fuck.
If you look at it from other perspective, typing the whole paragraph of details just to be ghosted can also feel disrespectful as fuck, while “Hi, can you talk right now?” is actually pretty normal.
There is no easy and universal answer, it’s all depends on context and the situation, just like anything else in human communication.Spending 30 seconds to type out what you want is hardly a big ask. If typing is a struggle for you then go take a typing course and catch up to everyone else in this century. I don’t want a vague “can you talk right now?”. I can’t answer that question accurately when I’m in the middle of juggling multiple different things pretty much all day long. I need to know what the context is and how much time it is likely to take to make sure it’s not going to derail the other shit I have going on. As the person who is demanding attention from someone else you should be doing everything in your power to minimize the inconvenience to them.
Hi
If I’m out of office they can still type the message and I’ll see it later. If they can’t wait and would send it to someone else if I don’t immediately respond to the “hi”, then they could either copy-paste it, or - even better - send it to some relevant channel that contains multiple people capable of assisting them instead of PMing it to me.
As long as it’s just an “hi” you don’t know what it is and have to assume it’s super urgent. Once you answer, they can disclose the actual matter in its full mundanity, resting assured they have already confirmed your attention.
Hi!
I don’t answer “Hi” anymore.
If they need help they’ll ask what they need.
I have some people that my entire message history is “Hi” and no answer. Because they eventually realize they should ask in our QA channel instead of dm’ing our team members.
It generally takes me about a year to train people on stuff like this.
