September 27, 2007

• The magic words

  Oh yeahhhh. It’s the seven minute version of I’ve Seen All Good People with the earth-shattering organ solo. Thanks, last.fm!

  Mumsy and Dad raised me to have good manners. Please, thank you, holding doors open, smiling and being polite in general . . . so it’s sort of funny that I have to make a conscious effort to be nice when I’m emailing people for help.

  I had to email several people at OU (alma mater, O-hiiii-ooooooooo) to
  work through some headache inducing issues, and I had to make a
  conscious effort to be both coherent and reasonable. Going through
  thousands of messages in a day makes you cognizant of what you like and
  what you don’t like to have to read. Suffice it to say that I wrote my
  message, erased it once and rewrote it before it had the tone I wanted
  to convey.

  Answering lots of messages has made me realize that the tone people take in e-mails is usually very similar to their spoken tone – either very casual or not as polite as I’d hope to be in a message. It’s also made me realize that most every angry “rargh, something is wrong and I’m furious” email I send is going to be read by somebody whose job it is to sort through my wrath.

  So, to sum things up, I promise to be nice to you if you email me asking for help. I might even put “xoxo” at the end, but that’s not terribly professional.

  • 12:30 pm
  • 2 Comments