In a meeting notice I received for an event I am scheduled to attend this week, the organizer asked that attendees "please try to arrive promptly." Now, I guess I can't speak for everyone else, but I am willing to bet that the majority of people in the workforce always try to arrive promptly. They do not wake up in the morning and say, "I think I am going to be purposefully late for work today" or "I think I will be fashionably late for the important merger meeting tomorrow." I, for one, certainly always try to be on time for work; the fact that I am sometimes tardy is always related to some unforeseen circumstance - an accident on the freeway, perhaps, or errant eyebrow hairs that need to be plucked immediately - and not an intentional effort on my part to not be on time.
These things seem sort of obvious to me; that if someone says something starts at a certain time, they are expected to arrive promptly, especially in the working world. Just like when you receive an e-mail, the natural response is to read it. So when one sees an e-mail with the subject "PLEASE READ" in all caps, the natural reaction is "Duh." When one receives a voicemail to "please read the [aforementioned] e-mail I sent you" the natural reaction is to bang one's head against his or her desk and plot career change.
Micromanagement at its finest.
1 comment:
The one that gets me is the "please think of the environment before printing this email" line. I mean, I get what the point is, and it is a commendable one, but really? We are adults. The people who habitually print emails are not going to stop based on some tag that is put at the end of an email signature.
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