Be Excellent To Each Other

in fairness, I added a read receipt to something last week. Still not got owt back, so I dunno if the person has read the email or not...

Just read receipts. You can set outlook to never send receipts if the sender asks for one.

Oh, can you do that in Thunderbird as well?

People sat within talking distance emailing you.

Don't care.

People within talking distance shouting towards you.

Best way is to hit them with a tape-measure, I find.

People.

*retreats into cave*

That TV advert for diet chocolate stuff that has the verse



In it.

It causes me actual pain when I see it.

I used to get that, except it was "urgent", and about 20% of the time, it wasn't urgent. At all.

Also, people who print out every single email, even when it means an entire A4 sheet being used for two lines saying the computers will be down for two hours, then printing another two lines on a new sheet two hours later when they're back up. When the public are paying for the paper and ink. Nnnngh.

We had a circular advising against this practice at work a while back. Kudos to the person who left a copy of the email on the shared printer.

Hmm. I was going to say "that stupid message you get at the bottom of the email in some organisations, asking you not to print this email unless it's really necessary". Because, well, who prints out their emails?

People who say 'lol' out loud. A few in this company have started doing it and it makes me cringe.

Other office-based gripes:

1. Professional people who have animated GIFs of sodding dolphins at the end of highly serious emails. Thankfully I've now worked out how to pipe everything to plain text.

2. Our new voicemail system which takes forever to tell you how to listen to a message. Because, y'know, the fact it lasts for 32 seconds is so much more important.

3. Misplacing the keys to my drawer, which handily contains the keys to the other important cupboard.

lol

The minute a crazy-Internet-meme gets mentioned in either a newspaper or on the BBC, it has officially ceased to be amusing.

B3ta, and boards like that, where only about 0.5% of the content is actually good or amusing.

Thanks Squirt. Thanks a lot.

Saying 'I LOLed out loud' out loud is OK though, because it's ironic.

Heh. A friend of mine recently got a promotion, and sent an email to her boss. She forgot to remove the signature reading "I AM THE QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE", bless her.



My flatmate constantly says "WAG!" as an expression of dismay. Whatever the fuck it means, it gets on my tits.

I was once having an email conversation about some work thing with someone and eventually I got chastised because by pressing reply and leaving the previous text in the email I was wasting a lot of paper when he printed the email out.... Grghngngh.

I used to work for a company that did online recruitment sites. The number of people who applied for jobs with high powered law firms / investment banks / government departments with email addresses like "[email protected]" or "[email protected]" was amazing.

Or not that amazing, if you consider the type of people that seem to end up employed in such places

My office gripe. The fact that without fail on the first hot day the air-conditioning breaks for summer. But we're not allowed to open the windows because IT EFFECTS THE AIR-CONDITIONING. Arrrrgh.

This has been going of for the last few days.

My pet gripe - affects.

Stop impacting his feelings.

Sorry angry typing. Grrrrr.

2 spoonfuls each

You've leveraged the vocabulary there I see.

"Windows has blocked some startup programs". Good. CLicky x, bubble fucks off. Ten minutes later... same message agian. Actually, can I turn this off somewhere? I use Vista entirely as if it is XP and tend never to have any problems at all, but this is vexing me.

Also, my clients, when I phone them to ask them a question, such as "Is two o'clock on the fifteenth a good time for me to visit you, if not let me know when would be better, close as possible to that date/time, please" and have to leave this in a voicemail, and a day or so later I've got a message myself, saying "Hi Goatboy, this is CLient X, I'm returning your call. Ok, sogive me a call back when you get this, thanks".

SO IS IT CONVENIENT OR NOT, YOU FUCKER?!?!!!?!?!???!?!

I tend to get round to responding to those ones last.

Redundancy - of the corporate wanky vocab kind;

"Going forward, we will"... "We will"

"What it is, is/What I've done is"... "It is/I've"

Bah. And racing - oh, so many, but slow buggers who *do* stand in the 'wrong' place are fantastically annoying, as are people who run together. All bets off for any fun run, though - do as you will there.

"Let me action that before the window of opportunity runs out."

Signs informing us that attacks on staff will not be tolerated. Forgive me for thinking there was any ambiguity in the matter.

Sadly there is.

Ha, yeah, I remember the first time I saw one of those. They appear everywhere now, it seems. People, eh?

Still haven't seen a 'Don't shit on the counter' sign though.

Ooh, and there was I, about to offload normally (and therefore boringly) into the porcelain throne! To the post office!

Just make sure you do it on the counter itself rather than their scales as you they may charge you by weight.

That always irritates me too. A solicitors firm I worked for was terrible for printing off any old e-mail, and they had a brazen refusal to adopt any green policies. Best, one demanding and whiny secretary was always printing off emails sent to her, then taking them to the sender to say 'Hi, you just sent this? Yeah, what's that about is...' Our repeated suggestions that she reply to the email were taken with quiet confusion.

We've got a department here that stubbornly avoids any of the technology we put in place for them. Sometimes we'd come in of a morning to find notes pushed under our office door rather than them dropping us a quick email.

Littering. I hate it.

What, you can't be arsed to walk over to a bin only a few feet away from you? I once spent a good half hour cleaning up some fly tipping some mouthbreather had dumped across the lake from Dove Cottage in the Lake District.

My mum took a very dim view of littering, and I followed in her footsteps. I was shocked when I was about eight when getting a life in Andrew Wright's* car, when he dropped a Mars Bar wrapper out through the window.

*Andrew Wright. At school wanted us to call him 'Andy May' after the footballer, inevitably this led us to calling him 'Andy Gay'. I made friends with Andy at junior school and invited him over, upon which he manically chased the cat about into a small hole in the wall, and it took ages to coax the poor thing out. Later, after he left, I asked my dad what he thought of him.

"Andrew Wright? I think he's a grinning twat."

That annecdote is legend amongst my mates. My dad's famously good at swearing. Probably why I didn't swear until age 15.