Emailitude
Despite a concerted effort to keep my inbox tamed, it’s now back above 30 undealt-with emails. While falling behind, I’ve noticed some recurring - and annoying - behavioral patterns. I’m sure the list is incomplete, so feel free to share!
- “The two-for” - a person who always — always — sends a second mail immediately after sending a document for a variety of reasons: she forgot to include the attachment, correcting a link (when she remembers not to forget to send attachments), or announcing the correction of a typo. Based on email alone, she comes off as a total flake. I surmise she is waiting for the return of corporate instant messaging.
For this reason, I always wait at least 30 minutes after eating receiving the first message before swimming responding.
- “I must copy my manager on everything” - Eeyore’s department is especially bad about this, I think, because Eeyore is a believer of strategeric micro managery or needs a high message count to justify her Crackberry. Or, it’s possible the senders want to ensure their manager knows they’ve made a token effort to be “proactive.” Note the air quotes.
Unless the sender’s manager is obviously involved, I just respond directly to the sender.
- “I must copy your manager on everything, too.” - This usually implies a duel between factions. Its variant:
To: Captain Sarcastic
Cc: The Sender’s Manager; The CEO; Captain Sarcastic’s Boss; Captain Sarcastic’s Lovable But Bumbling Sidekick; Eeyore;
Captain Sarcastic’s Idea of the Perfect Woman; The Custodianis implying I won’t respond to their request by overtly creating an audit trail. Their manager is copied, too, as if to say:
“I warned them to check their blood pressure / Beware of the Ides of March / Soylent Green is people — but they did heed me.
I weep for the children. The poor, innocent children.”
The response is similar to above: Unless the litany of executives, managers and engineers have an obvious need to know, I respond directly to the sender. I’m in the right mood, I enjoy crafting an over-detailed, super-helpful response that assumes they have the intelligence of a parsnip.
- “The passive-aggressive.” - this is more of an attitude.
- Example #1: suppose a coworker was supposed to send you a TPS report draft yesterday, but didn’t. A chronic procrastinator employing the hat trick of obstructionism, ambiguity and blame might respond: “I can’t give you a draft of the TPS report because you haven’t approved the table of contents.” Of course, they didn’t tell you they were waiting on you, nor does it necessarily matter. In reality, they were spending all their time leaving anonymous notes in public places. Because they’re assholes.
- Example #2: the “two-for” sends a link in a form that you can’t use like forward slashes (*nix) instead of backward (windows) ones, the document is on a machine that you don’t have permissions to access, or the document in a proprietary format that you cannot read without a specialized, expensive application (e.g., Photoshop, Auto-CAD).
- Example #3: the “Escalating Cc:” above.
The only response that seems to work: walk over and have a conversation.
- “The Escalating Cc:” - two people in an email discussion have differing opinions. Instead of, like, actually walking down the hall and having a conversation, they start adding additional people to the discussion until the entire fucking company is getting this mail.
In a recent one, the exchange eventually devolved into this:
“I don’t want to blame anybody, I want to fix the problem.” [three sentences later] “[...] but Bob was the last one to touch it. I will ask Bob when Bob comes in what Bob did to cause the system to become hopelessly broken. Bob! Bob! Bob!“
If I have time, I’ll walk over to ask Bob, whose work I respect, if I need to find the Covey Convincer — a 2×4 with “Synergize” written on one side — and go 7 Habits all over their ass, to put an end to this flagrant misuse of company time. If I don’t have time, but can muster patience, the thread will eventually die on its own.
