I don’t know why this pisses me off so much, but it does. Hell, I proofread and/or spell-check e-mails before sending them to one person! The following e-mail was sent to thousands of people on the Town’s e-mail distribution list:
Where do they find these morons? Do they not care about the impression they give of the Town government? I don’t think I’ve ever received an e-mail that didn’t have at least one glaring error that 6th-grader would notice.
I’m usually reluctant to post work-type garbage here, but I think I can beat that. The below is from a Corrective Action document written by our Director of Projects. A copy of this actually went to the client.
Parse that; I dare you.
It’s gonna cost more than we quoted you.
A large part of my job involves reviewing documents prepared by sales and marketing staff for technical deficiencies. Most of them are nothing but technical deficiencies.
Hmmm… let’s see, “We didn’t look close enough to see if there were any dashy circles, so we ummm… did stuff to the dashy circles we weren’t supposed to do. It’s all ok though cause we put the dashy circles on a checklist.” Is that close enough?
Well, I can understand the gist of it and all the words are spelled right. I did have to read through it a few times to figure out exactly what was being said, though–it’s the prose version of spaghetti code. I particularly liked this part:
Quality assurance assurance? Heh.
Yeah, it’d be almost amusing - if this clown wasn’t my nominal supervisor. And the Joint Use applications weren’t still completed incorrectly. And he hadn’t sent me to client with it making me look stupid. And it wasn’t on a fucking Corrective Action for gowd’s sake - a Corrective action which was required because he himself didn’t do the work correctly. The client spotted the mistakes after less than 30 seconds of review when I plopped them down in front of him. I had to bring them back so we could do it all over again necessitating a drive of ninety miles out of my way (180 if we count round-trip). Fortunately, if there’s anything fortunate about such a cock-up, the JU applications were for only a few hundred pole attachments; could easily have been several thousand.
Also, the subject matter was completely fucking inane, and no one gives a shit about this missing, broken cell phone or they would have claimed it already. The clueless asshat wasted several hours of other peoples’ collective time in sending out the email.
Bullshit. A few years ago, I was at a Hamfest looking for a replacement battery pack for my Heath dual-band HT. I put it down someplace and managed to walk away without it. Never did find it. I would have appreciated an announcement or email or whatever that someone had found it. That radio might not have meant a damn thing to 99.999% of the population, but it meant something to me.
Looks like it’s catching. Maybe you should stay away from him for a while.
Heh. I’d dearly love to. I’d be happiest if I could get an entire midwestern size state between the two of us.
One day I came in to the coffee shop I was enslaved at, to find a dirty, crumpled, nasty uniform shirt hanging with a handwritten note from our regional manager from Head Office saying:
I giggled and pointed at the first mistake, and invited some co-workers to share in the mockery.
The next day, a particularly brown-nosed co-worker (with management ambitions) had crossed out “unexceptable” and corrected it.
“There,” however, remained.
Ha. I’ve got it worse. Here was today’s email. I was cc’d.
MrkI have try 3 xx’s too fax u the Brady paperwork but your ansering machine keeps picking up instead I did fax it back too Brady tho. I will keep trying why don’t you or your wifes give me a call when someone is there so I can fax it to you?
This is a native English speaker. I couldn’t make this stuff up.
Someone who loses something can take proactive steps to find it, such as checking with festival organizers or a lost and found. I don’t think it’s a good idea to send out a mass email to thousands every time someone misplaces an inoperational mid-priced portable electronics device.
Did I just use the word proactive in earnest? Somebody slap me.
you or your wifes?
Utah.
Oooh, I’ve got a good one. The Manager @ my work sent an email with a VERY wide distribution list (including the President of our company) referring to the state of Virginia and the state of Vagina. Talk about humiliating.
OMGROTFLMFAO! He has since utilized me for writing his mails and I email them back to him and he pastes them into his email as his own.
Meh. Town employees.
Here’s a quote from an official document I recently received from my town:
Poor exclamation points. Since the advent of email, a single exclamation point doesn’t seem to be worth anything anymore.
heh heh … lots of occupational hazards working for the public service, I can’t count how often the word “pubic” makes it into official documents. I think they should do a mass change to everybody’s autocorrect so that it will become “public” with a minimum of embarassment.
The best part was one time a fellow was writing a speech for the Minister about the gas tax, and he didn’t notice that he had spelled it “gay tax” until it had passed on up the line … fortunately the Minister said it correctly but we all had a good laugh about it. Now THAT would be an interesting turn of events.
My girlfriend works for the development office of Penn State, she is the one who tells you how nice it would be if you donated 200 million for a new building or two. The athletics department has their own development office which they tend to staff with exPSU athletes who couldn’t find a job doing anything else and weren’t good enough for the pros.
This has some funny consequences such as the time they sent a mailing to all of their doners, tens of thousands of them, describing how they had to modify their donation schedule. You see, they were paying “in the rears”. They went on to describe what paying “in the rears” meant and used the phrase two more times. No one discovered the mistake until it had been out a week and the calls and emails started pouring in. Even now the author does not admit the mistake and believes it is synonymous with “in arrears” as opposed to meaning “up the ass”.
Now the whole department has to have everything they do checked by the main development office.