Tuesday, February 26, 2013

ranting against !!s in emails.

My boss has ticked me off before throwing exclamation points into an email where I made a minor mistake, forgot to type in a chgrp command to make a set of files accessible outside our group when we load them to the mass storage area.   "Please fix this and make sure it doesn't happen again!"  I wanted to tell him off at the time but I pushed it down and told myself I was being overly sensitive and only mentioned it in the supposedly anonymous survey of his supervisor style I had to do for his "leadership academy class"

Sunday when he was on call he wrote a snarky subject header of "XX needs to be fixed (again!)"  to our partner agency in Taiwan and the issue was not even a repeat on XX,  it had happened on YY a few days earlier and XX had been having off and on issues related to not having sufficient battery power, so thus having partial shut downs and having to wait until the solar panels caught things up to be functioning 100%.  And even if had been a repeat issue on XX, it is not something that happens because the partner agency didn't fix something correctly it is something they have no control over. 

If it was not my boss I would march in their office and tell whomever wrote the email that I think it was unprofessional and don't they think they should pay attention and not throw the !!s into work emails as though they are emailing or texting their teenage kids,  "what if you offended these folks,  and you cc'd their big boss as well with that stupid teeny bopper, EMO, over the top subject header" 

But I'm pretty hesitant to dress him down since he is officially my boss.   I believe his boss still gets these emails, so I should just leave it to him but OTOH I really really have a problem with flinging those damn !!s and have considered that I might inform him he needs to knock it off or I'll resign on the next one if he flings !s at me again over some trivial issue so perhaps I should try to approach the admins and say "perhaps we need a memo about writing professional emails?"   I'd feel like a snitch, but perhaps that is better than having a loose cannon writing emails that piss people off.

  I'm hesitating, wondering if *I* am being the EMO one and putting too much into the damn !!s and no one else in the world would do that, even in an Asian society where "saving face" is very important and I think they have pretty rigid social rules (underling do not ever solve a new problem if they can't clear things with their boss first) and I have chafed about that with them before.  

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