Wisdom you can use. I wish I had read this seven months ago, it might have saved me a lot of grief and loss.
For the record alcohol wasn’t involved but passion for the volunteer cause was, to my enormous regret. Paid non-profit directors can be real jerks to volunteers and there aren’t many guardrails if they are so inclined.
Draft the emails somewhere the send button cannot be inadvertently pushed. Vent here with us here and other friends not connected to it for a couple of days or a week, whatever it takes to let the initial frustration and sting dissipate. Then open those emails back up and see if there is any potential gain to editing them and then sending them. In my 75 years of experience more than 90% of the time it’s best for me to just let it go and move on.
This can be a huge issue. Passion is not good judgment. Passion is not good research. It’s not even ethics. It’s just passion.
Some passion is well-directed. Much is not. In all the years I was a honcho in the pilots union it was the passionately wrong volunteers who were the biggest challenge. They brought great energy to the fight, but spent most of it fighting us, not the opposition.
That too is wisdom.
A technique I use is fill out the To: field last, not first. Same for Cc: & Bcc:. Just leave 'em blank. You can’t possibly send something with no destination.
If I need to make it a reply to an existing email string, I click that button to get the email started, then clear out the To, etc. fields. I can always refill them later.
I do that for many emails, not just ones that need to calm down before maybe sending. On any long or involved email, the likelihood of an errant click sending it half finished only goes up as it gets longer. So finish composing, then address it to somebody. Just like writing a paper letter; you typically do the envelope last, not first.
They can sit in your drafts folder indefinitely until they’re ready to send. Or ready to delete.
Well, it’s not quite the “cold light of day” yet, because I’m an early riser and the sun is only barely starting to show itself. But the alcohol has left my brain and BOY AM I GLAD I kept my mouth shut.
How could they? Very simple. Each of them has an ongoing role to play, where as I am now thankfully released from any further responsibility - I announced back in January of this year that I wasn’t going to run for reelection to the board when my term expired in July, that is to say now.
So yeah, while it might have been nice if someone had written something like, “I agree with CairoCarol, we need to focus on blah-blah-blah,” the fact no one did is simply an acknowledgment of the fact they’re going to handle stuff going forward, while I don’t have to.
Yeesh. Alcohol is bad for you, kiddies. Don’t drink and post. I’m really glad I came here to sulk/embarrass myself instead of sulking and embarrassing myself IRL. I have a good reputation with everyone, after 7 years of dedication and hard work. It would have been a shame to sully it.
In every circumstance of my life, there is not one situation where I regretted using restraint. I have fired off many emails I didn’t send, and letters, and Straight Dope posts. More often than not I was misreading the situation, making assumptions, overinvested due to personal reasons or otherwise wrong. I find it’s best not to try to communicate when I’m upset.
I was reading a book and about the Buddhist Eightfold Path and Right Action, and it introduced the idea that sometimes no action is the best action you can take. If your options are to potentially make something worse or do nothing, my bet is on do nothing.
I’m truly glad the emails didn’t go out. @CairoCarol that was very smart even with wine on board.
Maybe make carefully worded “goodbye” email to the board. Without bragging, say what you did and your concerns going forward for the group.
And…just, Let It Go.
A small update - last night a key person sent a text to my phone thanking me for my input to the meeting. I hadn’t seen because I had put my phone away. It was a nice thing to see this morning
I just want to add to the praise and say that’s some mighty fine adulting, especially after your post snooze realizations!
And hooo boy, do I sympathize. I have a tendency to get seething angry and brood. As a result, I also try to manage towards the hyper-rational responses when I can. Both IRL and on the board, I sometimes write out pointed (or flat out insulting, if it’s for the Pit) responses in notepad, and then make myself wait to submit them for at least 6 hours, deleting more than half of them at that time. And I don’t even have the excuse of being drunk! And each time I’ve let out “sick burns” I’ve felt remorseful, or at least, felt I shouldn’t have gone as far as I did. Because most of the time it made things worse.
So here’s to you, may your drinks and nights be long, you days free of remorse and pleasant!
A priceless tip Boo slinks off to file away for future use. Thanks!
It’s right up there with checking who the text string is going to before typing in anything and then absolutely checking it again before pushing ‘send’. Many a whoops I could have saved myself from when I was working and had multiple active text strings.
Even for perfectly ordinary emails the address is the last thing I enter, just in case of an accidental send. It doesn’t go in until after I’ve proofread.
Same. I give that advice to new articling students each year, and tell them about the file I once had that had four guys named “Mike” on it, each with a different position.
And I regularly cull the addresses on my “auto-fill” function.
For the record, in many but not all email clients these days, you have a very short period in which you can gawp in horror at what you accidentally set, do a quick copy to your clipboard, and then delete before/as it’s sent. NOT to be trusted 100%, and again, not all email clients, but something to file in the back of your head if you have that “d’oh!” moment of instant regret.
I recall a list of humorous units and units prefixes that defined the “ohnosecond” as the time interval between when you clicked [send] and when you noticed your mistake. Nothing about it being correctable.
Thus my disclaimers and provisos! I’ve successfully used it several times from gmail, but in all cases I was deleting in a matter of seconds - basically just long enough moment to scream a slow-mo “nooooooooooo!!!”, copy to clipboard, and delete/unsend.
Typing this as LSLGuy just got in a similar quip about “ohnosecond”. Because I wanted to show you this screenshot I just grabbed:
If you look at the third setting from the top, it shows your “Undo Send” time limit. Mine is manually set at 30 seconds (the maximum), but the default is 5 (!!!). So as I said, a matter of seconds. And there are a couple of things which can cause it to bork, or just random internet weirdness. And other email providers will have different options if they have the feature at all, and many may need to be manually enabled.
As for how to get there, in Windows 11, Chrome, I opened the client, clicked on the gear icon in the upper right corner, then clicked on the “Show All Settings” link near the top of the drop down, which gives me the screen image I linked.
Some of my best emails ever have been after drinking BUT…they burn bridges (at the least).
IMO the best thing to do is write the email/letter and then DO NOT send it. Wait till the next day or two when more sober and revisit it and re-write it with a sober mind.
You will find some truth in the first writing but you will profit from re-writing (probably).
to you, may your drinks and nights be long, you days free of remorse and pleasant!