Re: offline courtesy among list members

["C. Janzen" <cjanzen -at- mindspring -dot- com>]

A couple of comments in general...

1. Who scans their email by hand? Every package I've used for business 
or home has settings to scan automatically in the background.
2. I get between 100 and 200 messages a day between home and work, and 
the only way I can avoid being interrupted is to set the mail 
notification to off or to very infrequent. I know it's there. It doesn't 
care when I check it. :)
3. Some of the issues brought up are about other people's rudeness, not 
about the issue of thanking or not thanking. Don't send large 
attachments, don't send large sig files (though the legal clause some 
companies append is out of your hands), and make the email count for 
more than a "me too".
4. A "me too" is different than a "thank you" because generally a me too 
doesn't require much work, but a thank you is acknowledging that someone 
took part of their productive time and did something for you that they 
really didn't have to.
5. I send lots of mail. I have an ISP at home that is sometimes 
irregular in mail delivery and mail acceptance. If you don't respond, I 
haven't got the faintest idea whether you got it or not. You can hate 
the US postal service (for those of us in the States), but most of the 
time if you send a letter, the recipient gets it. Not always true with 
email. We like to think it is, but there are a lot of places mail can go 
awry, including (as someone noted) filters on your own system.
6. A reason why some people view either "Thank You (nm)" in the subject 
or just "thanks" in the body as bad form is the same reason your 
grandmother got irritated when you sent the thank you note for your 
birthday present and didn't say anything about it! Lots of people want 
to know that their effort helped, that they made a difference. How hard 
is it to say "Hey, thanks for the doc plan. My boss loved what I did 
with it, and the developers think I'm a goddess of documentation"? 
Guaranteed those three clauses don't take up near the bandwidth that 
your friend's dancing Santa Claus card took up!

I do get frustrated, because I don't have much time either. I try not to 
post or reply except when I see a place that I think I have unique or 
particularly helpful information. If I've done that, I'd like to know it 
made a difference. Well, time for me to increase my sugar intake and get 
rid of the grumpies. :)

Thanks,
Catherine

__________________
Catherine Janzen

Write Method, LLC
PO Box 13113
Overland Park, KS 66282-3113
(913) 383-8535
cjanzen -at- mindspring -dot- com





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