My friends at work constantly hound me to organize get-togethers outside of work, which I’m happy to do. One person in particular (let’s call her Nancy) is quite insistent each time, as she rarely gets out with us.
So yesterday I discovered that the AAA ball club opened their online box office yesterday, and there are incredible seats available for the weekend opener, and they’re pretty cheap. So I e-mail everyone, letting them know when the game is, where it’s at, and how much the tickets are.
Nancy responds back saying, “It’s my birthday weekend, I’ll be spending it with my fiance.”
That’s a completely valid answer. I wouldn’t expect anyone to break plans like that. So I get everybody else’s money, and bought the tickets this morning. 5 minutes later, I get an e-mail from my administrator, asking me to fill in for Nancy during lunch on Friday (this Friday), since people in her department are taking her out for her birthday.
Opening weekend is the first week of April.
Her birthday is this weekend, in February.
Seriously - my initial e-mail to everyone consisted of 2 sentences: “Tickets went on sale this morning. Anybody interested in the weekend opener on Friday, April 8 @7:00pm?”
Is it that fucking hard to both read and comprehend those 2 simple sentences? Was there some element of confusion I included in there that I’m not discerning? Are “April” and “February” similar in spelling that she may have confused the two?
Or have I just surrounded myself with complete boobs?
Kind of thing happens all the time. I opened a thread the other day about a means for establishing formal debates. The OP said that a new forum isn’t really necessary, but one or two people responded with something like, “Why would we need a new forum for that?”
I can see how she might have skimmed over the “April 8” part and just grokked “Friday” to mean this coming Friday, if she was in a hurry, or distracted, or something. It happens and I wouldn’t necessarily consider her a boob unless she did stuff like that all the time.
And if she bitches at YOU for the miscommunication, well then she’s just a big jerk.
A friend of mine was putting together a lavish wedding several years ago. A month or so before the wedding she sent out an e-mail to everyone announcing that she and her sweetie had actually already been legally married for a while, for insurance reasons. I however, completely glossed over the “1996” in the e-mail and thus was shocked (although still happy for them, of course!) when it came up at the wedding reception that they had actually been married for more than a year, rather than just a few months.
This sort of implies that you know people who do read emails. I know very few of them.
Seriously, email is a joy - the best form of communication there is, between the two or three people I know who actually have the skill set to read it. Most people, however, appear to be incapable of actually understanding an email message. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve sent out a business email that may consist of two or three basic questions. I’m lucky if I get back an answer to one of them, and even that’s not a guarantee.
So, did you ask Nancy if she wanted to go to the game IN APRIL? This would have been a perfect opportunity to go talk to her and have a laugh, rather than getting all bent out of shape about her stupidity. It’s not all that hard to miss a vital word in emails. We’ve all done it, and had it pointed out to us with varying degrees of kindness.
My point exactly. If you had paid basic attention to the OP, you’d see that I had already bought the tickets by the time I realized her mistake. I did, however, alert her to her mistake, and we had a laugh about it.
But I do like the idea of 5.1 Surround Boobs. Sign me up.
Yabbut, we’re saying that it’s an understandable mistake and not something to get bent out of shape about. Your use of phrases such as “is it that fucking hard” and implying that she’s a “complete boob” seemed overly disparaging.
We understand the timeline of the story, but your reaction to it (as expressed in the OP) seems a bit harsh. Just sayin’.
I have some clients that do the same thing as Athena’s: I’ll ask three questions, they answer #1, I reply and say, “Thanks – but what about #2 and #3?” Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s hard to write a polite, professional response to these when my mind is screaming, “Hey, wake up!!” And the worst offender is overseas, so it’s usually not practical to call them because of the time difference.
