Our system at work just went through a recent upgrade, and it seems to work pretty well. One of the things that people seem to have really taken to is the ability to format their subject lines. And to add extra emphasis to the blather they constantly spew, they’ll bold it.
Who the fuck cares, Munch?
Well, I do. Because unread e-mail subject lines already appear in bold - so they aren’t garnering any extra initial attention when they send their message out. Except after you read the message, the subject lines stays in bold - and subsequently fools me into thinking that I’ve either (a) not read that message from this morning and am losing it or (b) my e-mail box is all fucked up and something funky is going on.
So what I do is delete each and every e-mail with a bolded subject line (or throw it into a folder labeled “Bold” that I’ll never look in again). I work with a building full of bastards, each and every one of them.
Oy vey, this is my boss. Except that she is selective about what she uppercases. So from her, it reads more like “I am FIRMLY convinced that using UPPERCASE letter makes my writing MORE EFFECTIVE.”
She also marks every email she sends out as URGENT, and uses that silly little red flag option, to the point where I just turned off the option that shows that flag, since it’s used by her so often that it doesn’t even mean anything.
Heh. I used to work at a company where the VP of Engineering once said in a full department staff meeting that everything was going to be assigned a number 1, or highest level, priority. This worked about as well as one would expect. It eventually led to a system wherein priorties were assigned 1a, 1b, 1c. . . . He became president of the entire organization shortly after that. And I got fired.
Fucker finally got his comeuppance though. I read in the local newspaper a few months back that some federal agency from which the company had accepted grant funds, was suing his ass for over 2 million bucks. And going after his personal assets, too, since he (and a couple other guys there) had somehow foolishly attached them to the organization.
Yeah, that’s so stupid. It’d make sense if everyone used the ‘urgent’ flag consistently, then one person playing the system would work. But no-one ever used it, and if they did, all spam would, so it would be instantly useless. In fact, some spam has started marking itself less urgent, presumably on the grounds that that had been hitherto only used by real people.