Not relatable. I want you to feel like you are inconveniencing me by reaching out.
Reading this thread, what’s with all of this anxiety over composing an email?
The fact I even have to write you an email indicates you have already inconvenienced me for not making this information available to me already. Your website. Your confluence page. Your bug report. Whatever it is. So I’m being just polite enough to bite my tongue and not call you an asshole. In fact sometimes I am extra polite as a form of sarcasm and venting my anger by being passive aggressive.
There are people out there that infer negativity from an email if you don’t do the exact thing they expect. The exclamation marks was something that two of those people told me was necessary because being clear and direct instead of overly cheery was ‘hostile’. Yes, ‘We did a thing and it is time for the next thing’ was said to be hostile by these two and the meme gave me flashbacks.
One of them was fired and the other retired and I longer have to play the exclamation mark game! See, that was genuine excitement and not playing it up for petty jerks.
you mean you don’t send all your emails in one bold all caps run-on sentence? Weak.
HELLO KAREN PLEASE HAVE YOUR TPS REPORTS ON MY DESK BY MONDAY THE INVENTORY LIST BY TUESDAY ORDER ANOTHER COFFEMAKER COULD YOU COME IN EARLY TUEADAY THANK YOU!!!
Yep!
Found the person GenAI based their emails on.
I’m in this picture and I don’t like it
Here’s a smiling emoji to let you know that despite the lack of exclamation points in my message, I remain friendly, approachable, able, and willing to carry out your task. 🙂
My IT ass never includes exclamation points.
My accounting ass has to let you know that while I’m aware that accountants are among the most depressed workers in the workforce, I stand out from my peers by being chipper and ready to help.
Now just stop asking me which GL account code to use because I know you’ll pick your own, and I’ll have to clean it up later. Job security, I guess.
My accounting ass has to let you know that while I’m aware that accountants are among the most depressed workers in the workforce, I stand out from my peers by being chipper and ready to help.
I met one like you once—they were really helpful and highlighted some stuff in a spreadsheet to help us work out what we needed to do.
The highlighting was in grey.
Im a software engineer snd we had to do some integrations with Sage and seeing GL Account Code has shaken me as that was a terrible ordeal.
Trying to balance things just melted my brain and double extra accounting just seems so, dare I say, stupid!
It didn’t help that the accountant I was liaising with would tell me about bugs and explain things like in an accountant and I hated every moment.
On a related topic, does anyone know why upper management people exclusively do not use greetings (hi, hello, etc.) on their emails? Yes, there are rank-and-file people who do that too, but I notice 99% people in leadership positions write emails like text messages. Maybe because they’re on their phones most of the time and/or use speech-to-text? But I know a lot of them who do this even on their laptops. I dunno, it just gives this air of superiority complex to me.
Obligatory i feel seen
When I see an exclamation point in an email, I assume there’s some social anxiety going on and prepare to treat that person with patience and kind indulgence.
Awesome! I appreciate people like you! I tend to use exclamation points in work emails when I’m asking near strangers to do stuff for me. You rock!
Right after I got my first job out of college, I sent an email like that to a coworker, and later, when I saw him in person, I mentioned the email, and he said that he saw that stuff at the top and just deleted the email without reading further.
Now, that guy was an asshole, not just for that interaction but for many others. For example, he had a doctorate, and insisted that people call him “Dr. Clark”, rather than his first name, even though nobody else did that.
But I did start writing emails much better after that. I write the subject in order to get people to decide to read the body. The first sentence of the body is what I am asking them to do. The next few sentences are the most important points, and the rest is details. I know… It’s just like they teach you to write in English classes, but it didn’t sink in until I spent a long while writing an email and it was immediately tossed in the garbage unread.
It is kind of sometimes a can’t-win situation.
If you don’t fluff them up first, then they get upset that you’re too blunt. But if you do add the fluff, then other people get upset that you’re wasting their time with fluff.
Personally, I think a healthy person should be able to accept an email that says like “Please update SomeLibrary to 9.0.2 (or later) by Friday. The maintainers fixed a security issue, and we should upgrade” without crying about how you hurt their feelings, but many people are not healthy.
My emails to clients are just a stream of consciousness about the fix to the bug they reported.
If I’m particularly overthinking I just get my boss to proof read and edit.
[ homer disappearing into the shrubs ]
