One of the things I do is recommend and approve data security and storage solutions.
I got a marketing call yesterday, and asked the caller to send her product’s specifics to me. Today, I received the following e-mail (edited to remove specifics), along with attachments that describe the products in more detail.
I count at least one spelling error, at least four grammatical errors, a basic misunderstanding of my explanation of my company’s existing solution, and several conceptual errors about the product she’s hawking. While the latter may be somewhat forgiveable when non-technical salespeople attempt to sell technical products, the basic composition errors do nothing to assure me of her competence.
How in heaven’s name does a company expect a spelling and grammar-skills challenged person like this to reflect upon them?
Bricker, at first I was going to dismiss this “person” as a Mere Ultra Monkey, unfit to clutch at the hem of your garb–and therefore unworthy of your attention.
However–this came by e-mail.
This means the “sales-thing” is hereby promoted from Mere Ultra Monkey all the way up to Goddam Astro Chimp .
What, praytell is the difference?
A Mere Ultra Monkey spends it’s day stuffing bananas two at a time into it’s drooling maw with one paw, picking it’s fetid & pestilent nose with a second, whilst balancing on one prehensile foot & using the other to collect it’s own foul droppings & pelt the innocent passerby with shit. And those are it’s good points.
A Goddam Astro Chimp, on the other hand, does all of the above, & has, through years of patient training by NASA’s best scientists, learned to pound fecklessly on a computer keyboard to no good purpose.
Now you can file your correspondent under the correct classification.
I’d say it depends how nice you are feeling today. This person who sent the email is most likely very new to her job and has no clue how to pitch even her underwear.
You could voice your concerns via an email back to her or you could call her and let her know how to make her mails more clear, and not give her the sale or you could not give her the sale and tell her she’s developed mentally delayed.
I’d teach her a lesson by not giving her the sale and talking with her about her poor grammer.
So maybe it was the person’s first day. Seems odd that they wouldn’t have a boilerplate email she could send out. Unless, of course, that was the boilerplate email, in which case the whole company’s screwy.
But I think that if I had the time and the inclination, I’d email her back, pointing out the most glaring errors (and correcting them), and explaining to her that I was not going to purchase anything from her because her email gave me a poor impression of her company. If nothing else, this would inspire her to correct the email before she sent it out to someone else.
Notwithstanding the hyperbole of the title… I don’t plan to dismiss the products before reading about them.
And, Mangetout, there’s a rule about posts criticizing spelling errors having to contain at least one such error. I am happy to keep the universe turning properly with my contribution thereto.
Obviously, I think there’s a difference between Board posts and solicitation e-mails; gratuitous spelling errors are never to be admired, but the attention to detail required for professional sales is, in my view, a bit greater than needed here.
My question…if you keep your important IT information in a vault, this system will instead keep it safe in the computer? But what if the computer is inaccessible? (Power outage, fire has destroyed the building, etc.)
Since the “important information” in question includes such things as emergency passwords and system configuration information, I suppose they are assuming that an inaccessible computer also means no need to retrieve passwords - what would we access with the passwords, once we got them out of the “vault”? On the other hand, their literature also mentions continuity of operations plans, which may well be required in case a disaster leaves us without functioning computers.
When I used ‘On the other hand,’ as the introductory phrase for the sentence describing the continuity of operations plan storage, I had hoped to signal that, contrary to the previous sentence, this model made no sense at all. In other words, while there mightr be a saving grace in the storage of emergency passwords on the computer, I could see no such relief in the COOP documentation.
I’m with you 100 percent, Bricker. The advent of e-mail has made it entirely too easy for people to slack off when it comes to writing well in a professional setting. If this were the pre-Internet era, sending out such a poorly written pitch via postal mail, on a company’s letterhead, would never have been acceptable. (Or at least I hope not.) The fact that one can send these pitches by e-mail now does not obviate the need to write professionally. This person, I can assume, is at least a high school graduate or better; being fluent in her native language should be a given.
