People: Email & Names

When you interact with someone, say face to face, you get to gauge who they are, what they're thinking, the subtle and many clues from body language, posture, intonation and even just where they're looking tell you an awful lot about how that person works, how they think, whether you agree with them.

However, when you're communicating digitally, via e-mail or text, you loose this personal grip.

One has to therefore rely on the face value of the information presented, is it spelt correctly, is the grammar correct, have they thought out the reply and addressed all your requirements from anything you sent them?

In my case I am often asked things like... "What do you do to better yourself?"... "Or have you done anything of note recently"... And I'm asked by people who have read my blog, or CV, or just know me... And I often say "Have you read my book?... Have you read my Blog?"

This kind of interaction puts me on a huge downer, why should I bother with this person if they've not performed what I consider the basics of due diligence?

Then there's my huge pet peeve in E-mail... I send a mail... "Dear whoever, bla bla... Xel"... They reply... "Dear Zel"...

No, not "Zel"... "Xel"... spelling, and it's not just spelling, it's that you've been given the answer right in front of you, if you can't have been bothered to take the last thing you read, and put it into the first thing you write, you're being lazy or worst still you're being purposefully obstructive and annoying, because this grates on me so much.

I once worked with a lady called "Grace", she hated being called anything else, "Gracie", "Gracy", "G-dog"... All really, really annoyed her... and people did this day in, and day out, her final response was to stop communicating with these people with their own names... Even our co-boss, who was a "Mr Khan", he became "Mr Purple-Whipple-Snapple"...

When he queried this, she said "if you wish to call me G-Dog, I will call you anything I like also".

It was the perfect most polite and poignant reply on this matter ever seen, but it took a silly outrageous example to make this clear, if you can't call "Robert" a "Robert" on the next page, or a "Susan" a "Susan", or even a "Xel" a "Xel" don't reply.