Monday 18 February 2008

Lookout

A funny thing about email etiquette. Where I work at the moment there seems to be a protocol (and I mean in the non-computing sense of the word) in place with regard to the addressing of emails. Here's how it works. I am Jon EO Johnson and I plan to send a mail to Julie C. Customer advising her of what's going on and apologising for the fact that sweet FA has been done for months, but it's important that I copy in Y.Serious (who is my line manager) and Stephen Delivery, who is the contractor responsible for screwing up the original service delivery. Being a careful sort, I ensure that I adopt my best writing style and carry out a spell check before pressing Send. All well and good. What then happens is that I copy my To: and cc: lines to the top of the body text, so it looks a bit like this:

To: JC Customer, copy Y Serious and S Delivery for info (message begins below - my text)

I was really struggling to understand the point of this, because I kinda figgered that it would be obvious from the addressees as well as the context of the message that Y and S would be included for info. Was I (am I) very wrong? I don't know, but I did loudly mention my befuddlement at this seemingly pointless exercise before seeing a mail marked in exactly the same way by the guy to whom I had been talking. In any case, I refuse to toe the line.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sir,

As high-powered American Lawyers we can immediately cut to the very marrow of any bone of contention.
We recommend that you ask someone as to why that particular mailing system is used.
Of course, due to the fascistic systems of the modern workplace you will be marked as a "troublemaker" or possibly "a faggot" or "fag".
Be sure to collect a paper trail as soon as all this starts.

Sincerely.

Anonymous said...

Why would the lovely young man who writes this 'blog' be perturbed by ruffians referring to him as "a bundle of sticks" or "a cigarette"?

Anonymous said...

Grazie, grazie,
La bella haggi signorina que mucho defenso bambino bloggi esta contesta fiori mucho mepriso!
Via veritas este si: "A bound bundle of sticks is the ancient symbol of fascism."
Donde esta il symplicitista d'il Pape et Mia Farrow?
Et in Arcadia Ego,
Benito.

Anonymous said...

Ball and biscuit blogs are all the rage, according to Meg White, who is - strangely - related to Meg Ryan and Meg Mortimer.