A bonus rant, courtesy of Worky McWorkerson
File this one under something we got graded on in 1st grade: Reading Comprehension.
This seems to have been the week for Adults Who Can't Read. Actually, that's not true. I don't really know any adults who can't read. What I do know are lots and lots and lots of functioning adults, employed by my company, who seem to be intelligent, thoughtful, professional people ... with HUGE READING COMPREHENSION PROBLEMS*. I seriously want to start a telethon about this.
You know how it starts -- you send an email with 3 questions embedded in the text of a paragraph or so. The person answers one, you email back, making questions 2 and 3 more obvious, perhaps offset by bullets or actual numbers. You don't think much of it because everyone reads emails differently, but then it happens with about 8 more people in the same day/week.
Then a new problem surfaces. Someone reads an email incorrectly, and immediately fires off a blistering missive -- WE CAN'T DO THAT! or WE CAN'T SAY THAT! or WE AREN'T DOING THAT! and of course you or one of the many people who were CCd on the message (because that kind of message is never sent to only one person) are forced to answer as politely as possible, "um ... yeah ... we didn't say we were doing/saying that. If you take an extra minute to read the text, you'll see that we said [insert thing you can do here]." And suddenly it's an epidemic. You find yourself sending emails like this all the livelong day, to people you formerly assumed were intelligent human beings. And don't think, dear reader, that the problem is in the writer's hands (i.e., well, if Ant is having all these problems, perhaps it's Ant's writing that is at fault). No, in this case, it's been an entire week of a variety of email conversations, with a variety of authors. And it all boils down to CAN YOU PLEASE GO BACK AND EFFING READ THE ORIGINAL MESSAGE FIRST?
It all culminated in a large-scale communication I had to send this afternoon. Turns out RIM (the company that provides BlackBerry service nationwide) will have a "planned outage" on Saturday morning from 2:00 - 6:00 a.m. ET. This is nothing my company has control over -- it's like if Coke stopped making Coke and everyone wanted to know why my company wasn't stocking it in the pop/soda machines. The answer would be "because Coke isn't making it any more. Our firm has no control over that. No one else has it either." So the message names RIM, says the date and time of the outage, etc., etc. The email hasn't been in people's inboxes for 10 seconds -- I'm not kidding or exaggerating -- and I receive a reply back from the snooty Event Marketing girls (we think it's the pointy-toed shoes that make them so evil), "Enroute to Boca Raton, FL. Call me immediately so we can discuss access for me and the Team of Mean Girls." Now I happen to know that the person who we sent the message "from" is not even in the office, so forwarding it to her would be useless. So I write back, because Worky McWorkerson is all about Teh Surviss:
Hi [redacted] -- you've replied to the administrative mailbox we used for the bulk e-mail below; not to [the business owner who will get a hoot out of me BCCing her on this] directly.
[The business owner] is out today, so I thought I'd answer you since I know you're looking for a response.
However, if you read the message below, your fears should be allayed by
two things: 1. it is a RIM outage -- not anything that our firm has
control over. That is, their service, nationwide, will be down. We do
not/cannot affect that. 2. the outage is from 2-6 in the morning on
Saturday. I can't imagine this will be too much of a problem, but your
team should probably all have each other's phone numbers if you think
you'll be communicating during that time.
Hope that helps,
Worky McWorkerson
Her reply? "Oh, I didn't notice the 'a.m.'!"
Is it just me, or does that seem the kind of thing a person should check for before firing off snotty messages?
*Don't send me hate mail about people with genuine disabilities. All the people with real disabilities I know, know they have a problem, and take the extra time to actually read stuff they are sent.
This seems to have been the week for Adults Who Can't Read. Actually, that's not true. I don't really know any adults who can't read. What I do know are lots and lots and lots of functioning adults, employed by my company, who seem to be intelligent, thoughtful, professional people ... with HUGE READING COMPREHENSION PROBLEMS*. I seriously want to start a telethon about this.
You know how it starts -- you send an email with 3 questions embedded in the text of a paragraph or so. The person answers one, you email back, making questions 2 and 3 more obvious, perhaps offset by bullets or actual numbers. You don't think much of it because everyone reads emails differently, but then it happens with about 8 more people in the same day/week.
Then a new problem surfaces. Someone reads an email incorrectly, and immediately fires off a blistering missive -- WE CAN'T DO THAT! or WE CAN'T SAY THAT! or WE AREN'T DOING THAT! and of course you or one of the many people who were CCd on the message (because that kind of message is never sent to only one person) are forced to answer as politely as possible, "um ... yeah ... we didn't say we were doing/saying that. If you take an extra minute to read the text, you'll see that we said [insert thing you can do here]." And suddenly it's an epidemic. You find yourself sending emails like this all the livelong day, to people you formerly assumed were intelligent human beings. And don't think, dear reader, that the problem is in the writer's hands (i.e., well, if Ant is having all these problems, perhaps it's Ant's writing that is at fault). No, in this case, it's been an entire week of a variety of email conversations, with a variety of authors. And it all boils down to CAN YOU PLEASE GO BACK AND EFFING READ THE ORIGINAL MESSAGE FIRST?
It all culminated in a large-scale communication I had to send this afternoon. Turns out RIM (the company that provides BlackBerry service nationwide) will have a "planned outage" on Saturday morning from 2:00 - 6:00 a.m. ET. This is nothing my company has control over -- it's like if Coke stopped making Coke and everyone wanted to know why my company wasn't stocking it in the pop/soda machines. The answer would be "because Coke isn't making it any more. Our firm has no control over that. No one else has it either." So the message names RIM, says the date and time of the outage, etc., etc. The email hasn't been in people's inboxes for 10 seconds -- I'm not kidding or exaggerating -- and I receive a reply back from the snooty Event Marketing girls (we think it's the pointy-toed shoes that make them so evil), "Enroute to Boca Raton, FL. Call me immediately so we can discuss access for me and the Team of Mean Girls." Now I happen to know that the person who we sent the message "from" is not even in the office, so forwarding it to her would be useless. So I write back, because Worky McWorkerson is all about Teh Surviss:
Hi [redacted] -- you've replied to the administrative mailbox we used for the bulk e-mail below; not to [the business owner who will get a hoot out of me BCCing her on this] directly.
[The business owner] is out today, so I thought I'd answer you since I know you're looking for a response.
However, if you read the message below, your fears should be allayed by
two things: 1. it is a RIM outage -- not anything that our firm has
control over. That is, their service, nationwide, will be down. We do
not/cannot affect that. 2. the outage is from 2-6 in the morning on
Saturday. I can't imagine this will be too much of a problem, but your
team should probably all have each other's phone numbers if you think
you'll be communicating during that time.
Hope that helps,
Worky McWorkerson
Her reply? "Oh, I didn't notice the 'a.m.'!"
Is it just me, or does that seem the kind of thing a person should check for before firing off snotty messages?
*Don't send me hate mail about people with genuine disabilities. All the people with real disabilities I know, know they have a problem, and take the extra time to actually read stuff they are sent.