Not worthy of the pit but a little venting is needed.
What is with those people who feel the need to tell me in their sig - “Please do not print this email unless you have to”, sometimes in green and a picture of a tree for added effect.
Yeah, you know what, until I read this in your email I had a bizarre fetish to print any email I got. I would log in and just open all the emails and print** each and every one of them** including the ones from my Nigerian friends!! I just love printing emails. :rolleyes:
And of course you had to put it in your sig because you know my memory span lasts only a second or even less, and so unless you reminded me of this in every email of yours, I would go into this mad “email printing disorder” over and over again. Thanks again!!:rolleyes:
Is it that these people actually did print emails only as a matter of habit or whatever, even if they did not need a hard copy and only when someone sent them this message in his sig did they realize that they need not print emails and now feel the need to send this message to others? Seriously…
You may not have “mad printing disease” but plenty of other people do. My agency has been getting away from paper. We keep case records electronically. We are only supposed to print entries when specific events take place. Some people print the whole record each time they add an entry. Our timesheets are submitted electronically - some people print a copy of each timesheet. The agency-wide and various office directories are updated monthly and stored on a public drive- people print them and wonder why all the phone numbers are wrong when they are using a two year old printed copy rather than the up-to-date electronic directory. I haven’t received an ordinary printed memo in five years - they are sent as email attachments. People print copies of these, along with any other emails they receive. Forget the tree and the message about saving the environment - I want to put a picture of a $10 bill and a message saying " The paper budget will only stretch so far"
A lot of us DON’T put that on as part of our email. Many businesses auto-append legal boilerplate to all outgoing emails, and some companies put the “Please don’t print this unless you have to” bullshit as part of that crap. And better yet, it auto-appends it in such a way that it looks like a standard email signature block, so you get people like the OP bitching at us for something we’ve got no goddamn control over.
My renewable forest investment is going belly up because you dopes won’t print anything anymore. Thousands of acres of trees now under contract to several developers. Without a need for these trees, I guess it’s gonna be condos and strip malls.
Same thing happened to the Christmas tree farms in my family. No need for the trees, now they are home to McMansions.
I work in an industry where there’s a legal requirement to provide hard copies of e-mail correspondence under certain circumstances, and the law specifies that the entire printed e-mail has to be provided. Other legislation requires it to be presented in redacted form, removing anything deemed to be personal information it would be unlawful to disclose. This means that each page has to be copied again after redaction, otherwise the text isn’t properly obscured.
In spite of this requirement, it’s surprising how many companies in our industry still adopt the “P Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.” as part of their signature. Jeez, practically the only times e-mails get printed is because it’s mandated.
For a while, I kept a growing stack of pages that had to be printed - twice - only to accommodate the signature. If you know that the law frequently requires that your correspondence be printed out, if you really cared about the environment you’d shave that monster sig down as much as possible, set your e-mail client up to omit it for replies, and take the time to delete old quoted text from long threads when you reply.
A guy I know worked for a government agency that was all full of the *go green * rah-rah. Their standard tag line was “Think before you print this email”.
So he had his own versions. I don’t still have any examples but they were close to this:
Think before you print this email. You might want to turn on some lights or something so you can see the paper better.
Think before you print this email. You might want to print extra copies for the files.
It is particularly annoying when I print an email (which is rare) and it uses an extra sheet of paper just because of the “Please consider the environment” message at the bottom.
I block all “Fwds.” It’s like going out to the mailbox & getting something addressed to “Resident.” (my cousin doesn’t understand this.) If I get an email (to me!) & somebody says “Don’t print this” I’m like Wha…? I’ll frame it & hang it for Christmas if I wanna…"
I’ve had a couple bosses that “made themselves more efficient” by ignoring email. At set times of the day, their secretaries would bring them the printed out copies of that day’s emails; they’d go through the paper copies, make notes on the reply, then give it back to the secretary to type and send the email.
For one of them, I could always tell that the response came directly from him when it didn’t have capital letters, punctuation, or proper spelling.