Etiquette links
Over on Livejournal, mimerki talks about answering machine etiquette:
Calling a person every evening for a week and hanging up on their machine, especially a known recalcitrant and asocial person to begin with, is likely to just lead to them refusing to pick up the phone until you talk to the machine. Yes, it is passive-aggressive. So is not talking to my machine. And I assure you that, as the person calling, you want to talk to me more than I want to talk to you.
Miss Manners says: NO SHOUTING IN EMAIL.. Interesting primarily because, wow, people still need to be told this?
Email Tide asks, Should your inbox be empty? Empty inboxes are, of course, a tenet of the geek-friendly GTD productivity system.
Mobile phones may soon be allowed on planes. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
The social networking weblog asks, What does “friend” mean online? Gah, I’ve seen this drama way too often on LiveJournal and other social networking sites: you add someone as a “friend” and they get a warm fuzzy. Then you get busy and trim your “friends list” and next thing you know you’ve insulted people by somehow suggesting they’re not your friend any more.
From the Guardian: Since when did it become OK to sign off work emails with kisses?
Miss Mentor posts about Cubicle Etiquette, including such important subjects as whether — and how much — to decorate your cube, and just how many action figures you should have, anyway.
And finally, via the ever-useful LifeHacker: Stephen Colbert, Email Assassin. Colbert talks with Will Schwalbe, author of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home
(Thanks to Mary for the first two links.)
7 comments7 Comments so far
As regards people needing to be told about shouting in email: yes, they do. I had a project manager at one point who was hounded about it for about six months by several developers. He refused to believe that it really came across as shouting; that the programmers weren’t being disingenuous about it. (The argument was a net loss: he ended up completely refusing to use email at work and would just phone people.)
At the same work place, we also had trouble convincing one of the programmers that he had to type out ‘are’ and ‘you’ in full in emails to clients, and wasn’t allowed to use mild obscenities in said emails.
It just goes to show that etiquette advice is a career for the long haul.
Mary: Oh god. I guess I’ve been lucky.
I just discovered your site and have had a lot of fun on it. And, yes, you would think that everyone knows not to do the all-cap/shouting thing. But then I keep finding people who don’t. Also, I think sometimes people write a whole message and then realize they’ve had caps lock on and are too lazy to rewrite or reformat it.
ps: Glad to see you are going to be reviewing SEND, the book that I co-wrote.
Will: Hi, and welcome! I’m delighted to have you here. I just subscribed to your blog recently, too; lots of good stuff there, though I haven’t had time to go through all the older posts yet. Don’t suppose you’d be interested in talking about geeks and email sometime?
Would love to talk about geeks and email sometime!
All-caps is not shouting. I don’t think it ever really was, except for people who liked to forward email etiquette lists. The “Caps = shouting” meme is one that I wish would go away.
What it is now is showing the world that you’re unable to use proper English mechanics. I would never tell someone “All-caps is shouting and rude,” but rather “All-caps makes your message hard-to-read and makes people think you don’t know how to use English.”
I assure you, as the recipient of some of these “THE CLIENT WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON” and “I DON’T UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEM GET IT DONE” and “REPLY RIGHT NOW” missives that I’m not being disingenuous about all caps email being shouting. I at least feel shouted at. And not through some conscious process of “hmm, capital letters, the internet tells me that he’s shouting” any more than I have to go through “hmmm, loud voice, red face, pitch change, I guess he’s shouting, huh” consciously when someone literally shouts at me.
I suppose there has some been some feedback: people are told that it’s shouting, so they use it in situations when they want to shout. People recognise those situations and associate capital letters with them.
Anyway, regardless of whether it’s a myth asserted by netiquette folks as Andy sees it or a genuine phenomenon as I experience it, I don’t know that I’d want it to go away. Being able to shout at people or recognise shouting from them is useful.