Here’s the story. I was assigned in a group project with some of my coworkers. One day we kept working till late-ish, around 11pm or midnight. When we finished for the day, we had some questions for the project manager so we sent him an e-mail.
Next day he starts chewing our asses for sending him an email that late in the night! Note that this happened back in the late 90s. Smartphones were scifi back then. You had to use a real computer to read emails and none of that fancy broadband of course, just dial up.
Also we didn’t require answers immediately and we made that clear on the email.
Actually I doubt this guy even had an internet connection at his home. He most likely read the email next morning at work, saw the timestamp and decided to scream on us.
So what’s your opinion? Did we break some rule or was the guy an idiot?
I think that’s a personal ‘thing’ (problem) he had. He might have had access to his email at home, and felt obliged to consider anything to do with work immediately. If he hadn’t mentioned this to you before, and it sounds like he didn’t, then he’s making a big fuss over something minor. What a wuss.
Sending someone an email at 11pm is just like caling someone at 11pm, and who the heck does that unless it’s an emergency or someone died.
Sure, in our enlightened modern era, we realize that they’re actually nothing alike, but for someone new to email, applying phone etiquette could seem reasonable.
I’m curious what made you ask about this, some 15 years later. Have an office reunion and were reminiscing? Anyway, no, I don’t think it was at all wrong.
No rule break that I ever heard of. I worked with companies that used e-mail extensively from the mid-90’s on and we used it all the time at all hours or on weekends. It was regarded as the equivalent of jotting down a memo and leaving it on someone’s desk to deal with when they returned to work. I never had the experience of people thinking it was something that had to be dealt with immediately. An emergency would be expected to be conveyed by a phone call. If he thought it was something that had to be dealt with right away that was his problem and pretty unusual.
My guess is that it made him feel guilty and/or embarrassed that you guys were burning the midnight oil while he was asleep. But he couldn’t just come out and say this, so he made up a reason.
But attitudes towards emails have dramatically since the 90s. And our netiquette is also getting better, I think. I used to get those slurgy “send this to inspirational message embedded with cheesy animated GIFs to ten people if you love Jesus as much as I do!!” every day. Now it seems like people uniformly recognize those things are more appropriate for FB, not people’s work emails and the like.
Sending e-mails late at night – especially from superiors to subordinates – can create unspoken expectations that they should be checking and responding to messages at all hours. I wouldn’t do it without a very good reason.
I’m on the east coat of the US, doing occasional contract work for a firm based in the UK.
Maybe it’s just because of the five hour time zone difference, but they regularly send me emails at 9AM their time (dead of night mine), and I regularly send them emails in the evening my time (dead of night their time).
It’s just the way life goes. Nobody expects a reply until business hours have long since started on the other side of the pond.
This is why there is such a thing called “work email address”. My boss recognizes that I check my work email only when I’m at at work. So if there’s something really critical, he needs to email me at my non-work email address.
