emails I have not sent, part n

[j4]

You wrote:
> STUFF MISSED FROM LIST STILL!!!!

THERE'S NO NEED TO SHOUT. A few points, though:

a) If every email you send is marked "URGENT!!!!", "asap pls" and so on, one -- or possibly both -- of two things will happen: i) your emails will all be demoted to the same level of urgency, ii) the updates and edits you're requesting will be done hastily.

b) If, furthermore, these emails are semi-literate four-page nightmares containing randomly spaced URLs, PDF attachments and only vague indications of what needs to be done to these, you can expect people to get confused.

c) It also helps if you cite real URLs for pages you want edited, rather than URLs you've MADE UP RANDOMLY OUT OF YOUR HEAD.

d) If these pages are so badly put together that the webmasters find them confusing, you might want to think about how your users cope.

e) Given that 90% of your illiterately-expressed updates do actually get done -- and done more accurately, more neatly and more correctly than you're asking for, mostly, without you even noticing -- within 10 minutes, it's a bit unfair to SHOUT RUDELY AT PEOPLE the one time that a couple of things get missed.

f) off.

Yours,
Janet (as webmaster)

Comments

[mhw.livejournal.com]

f) off.

*giggle* Quite!

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

[duncanneko.livejournal.com]

Brilliant :) Mind if I quote you on metaquotes?

[j4.livejournal.com]

Um, you can if you like...

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of my customer who sent me some updates for their page last week in what I can only describe as 'Engrish'. When I pointed out to them that "allows your software package name become ease" was not really making a lot of sense, they decided to rewrite what had been sent to them...

[nja.livejournal.com]

Ha! I have to deal with the "Centre of Quality Excellence", which teaches postgrad courses on how to make sure everything you do is of excellent quality, how to manage work processes to ensure quality, etc. Everything is done at the last minute. I get sent stuff to go on the web, followed ten minutes later by a phone call to say it's really and then an email half an hour later to say it's really and why haven't I done it yet? Last week I pointed out that the seminar in question had been planned months ago, and I occasionally take holidays, have to go to meetings, mark students' projects, etc.

What I have to do with most of their stuff is extract it from a crappy HTML email, strip out all the formatting, correct the spelling mistakes, punctuation, and errors of fact, and then send them a long email telling them what was wrong with the material and what I've done with it. I occasionally wonder who should be doing the lecturing and who should be learning over there.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

I make a point of using Outlook's "Importance: Low" setting. I imagine it's as popular a self-description as small condoms.

[karen2205]

I make a point of turning off the big red high importance markers before forwarding things, because they really irritate me - hello, this is *my* inbox; *I* get to decide what's important.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

Set up an auto-reply with a bogus N in the high hundreds:
"Your email is Nth in my action queue"

[techiebloke.livejournal.com]

Better: use rt, or somesuch, so that you can ignore the odd piece of bollocks
that hits your inbox, while having the ability to day to your boss "look, 99% of
requests get actioned within $SLA. Look at the pretty pictures!"

Better yet, write the $SLA, publish it, and /then/ tell your boss that your requests
are 99% within $SLA. If you do it right you'll get a gold star for producing an
SLA, (together with the procedure for submitting work), and then lots of future gold stars for being within it.

Worked for me, anyhow.

[olithered.livejournal.com]

Well, it certainly made me smile!