Saturday, March 8, 2008

Pet Peeve #001 : "Your Thoughts"

Perhaps my biggest pet-peeve is a forwarded e-mail where the forwarder types "your thoughts ?"

Let me interpret what that means for you the next time you get one:

... I have just typed 'your thoughts' in response to an e-mail that I got.  The reason I am forwarding it to you is because I've decided that my life is too important to actually spend the time necessary to provide my insights on the topic at hand.

...I also want you to notice that I am more special than you.  See, the person that sent me this e-mail didn't think to send it to you because they view me as superior to you.  They wanted to keep this bit of electronic knowledge only amongst those of us that work up here in the upper stratosphere.  I am going to include mere-mortals such as yourself to help remind you of these facts

...Perhaps you may be thinking of replying back to the person that sent this to me or worse-yet those included on the original distribution which I received.  Might I remind you that had they wanted your thoughts they would have asked you directly - in case you are wondering why they didn't - might I remind you of my prior two points.

... Now that you've got the responsibility of reading this e-mail thread, in it's entirety - including the mental parsing and reassembling of quoted text, removal of e-mail signatures, clicking on broken URL's, and the obscure line breaks that result from 7 different e-mail clients being used - perhaps you actually do have some thoughts of your own on the topic.

..What to do with your thoughts now that you may have some ? - You send them back to me, and nobody else but me.  Why only to me ? - Because I fully intend to take the intellect and brain-cycles which you have expended and apply them back in my response to the stratospheric ones to which this e-mail started.  Please send your e-mail response to me quickly so that I may reply back with this information before the e-mail thread takes another tangent.

...Oh - and one more thing - Please DNF else my abuse of your intellect may be noticed by others.

Yes, I'm jaded by the line "your thoughts".

So allow me to pose this whole rant back at you... Your thoughts ?

Best Regards,
Dave

No comments: