Online Communication

Overall, I love online communication, email and messaging have advantages over the phone that I couldn’t do without. However, some people really piss me off with the way they use it sometimes.

email: If I ask 5 questions, each in their own nice little paragraph and I started my email with “I have a few questions”, DO NOT give me an half-assed answer to the first one, leave it at that and consider the case closed. There’s a reason I asked five frickin’ questions and I expect you to at least aknowledge I asked them and tell me you’ll get back to me. Nitwit.

Messaging: If you ping me, asking “do you have a minute to discuss whatever issue”. DISCUSS IT. AIM, MSN and all of those are great sometimes and I consider them “halfsynchronous”, more direct and conversational than email but you don’t have to go back and forth immediately, both sides are usually working on something else and each “talks” when is convenient but if you ask if I have time now to discuss something, don’t make me wait 5-10 minutes between phrases because you’re doing something else! Or at least say “brb” or something. You asked for 5 minutes, that’s what I had, not 5 minutes spread out over an hour.

Messaging again: Every time you hit enter it’s a different line and a different “bubble” of text so when you write like this it’s horribly annoying and looks wayyyyy too important if I’m using a client that shows me the number of unread messages:

>> Yeah, so

>> I think

>> That we will

>> have to reschedule

>> our meeting

>> is that

>> ok?

You can’t write one single frackin’ phrase for that??

End useless rant.

[Update] As I was saying; researchers have found that people think they have correctly interpreted the tone of an email 90% of the time, but in tests, their interpretations are no better than chance.