I have found that the plethora of means of contacting someone confuses people about what is and isn't appropriate. This is especially relevant in the professional world, where ill-informed customers can really get my hackles in a yaw with a particularly bad breach. I have therefore decided to write my etiquette guide to communication with me in the always-connected age.
E-mail:
E-mail is a medium specifically to replace the transportation of written documents. I do not consider it conversational, and generally do not remember to respond to personal e-mails. That said, it is the perfect medium for exchanging notes, meeting transcripts, working out the details of an order, explaining a problem you wish me to solve and collaborating over documents.
E-mail etiquette
- Brevity is best. Please say what you have to say and then end it. No need for a salutation, or small talk.
- Use complete words. E-mail is a long form written document, there is no excuse for using texting-speech. I will mock you for using "lol" replacing the word "for" with "4" or "you" with "u".
- Use complete sentences with proper grammar, and proofread your work. Modern e-mail clients correct your spelling, there is no excuse for bad spelling. If your message is incomprehensible it will be ignored and I will ask you to rewrite it to clarify what you mean.
- Save the emotion. E-mail is a faceless medium and people already have a tendency to read with a negative voice, even when the writer didn't intend one. If you are upset or angry when you write your e-mail it will come through much more intensely than you may like. Writing in that voice can be given a couple of times, but it can quickly change my opinion of you and your request for the worse.
- Never read into the time-stamp on my e-mail. If I responded to your e-mail at 1:00am, that is not an invitation to begin a conversation or worse yet call me on the phone. There is no secret message hidden in the time stamp, it is not a mark of special importance or concern. All it means is that I sent an e-mail at a particular time.
Voice-mail:
Most calls anyone place to me will end up in voice-mail. This is not because I do not want to speak with you, this is because I do not believe in constant interruption. I believe that the task at hand, whatever it is, deserves my full attention. In turn, By letting you go to voice-mail, when I am able to speak with you, you will have my full attention.
That said, I do not actually listen to voice-mail. All voice-mails that come to me are transcribed into text and e-mailed to me, or written down as a message by someone else and given to me. Be as detailed as you like, or not, but I will not go back and listen to it if it is garbled. In most cases, I will take you're voice-mail as a page, and react to the missed call in my call log long before I actually read your message. Therefore do not be surprised if I am unaware of the contents of your message.
Phone Etiquette:
- Understand that pounding my phone line will make me react deliberately slower to your request to communicate. There is never a situation where continuous calling will coerce me to pick up the phone. Generally, I have a 1 day rule. I usually wait one day before returning a call when someone practices line-pounding. Yes, this does lead to situations where a person can prevent me from calling them back for several days.
- Do not play the phone-number capture game. Me calling you on my cell phone is not an invitation to start calling my cell phone. My cell phone is a personal line, it is not the secret squirrel line for reaching me . I pay for it with my own personal money to maintain the convenience it offers. The only people who have an open invitation to call my cell are people who have information that is important to me. That includes friends, family, my attorneys and bankers and some co-workers. If you are not on that list, your problems are not important enough to me to deal with them through my cell phone. If you break this rule, I will immediately blacklist you in the phone and none of your calls will get through again.
- If you think that I am not picking up because I am screening my calls, changing numbers to hide the origin will only make things worse. First off, this usually doesn't work because the area code gives it away, and secondly if you feel the need to resort to outright dishonesty to reach me, our relationship is probably over soon anyways. This goes for blocking caller-id when it normally functions on your line.
- In general I am not to worried about greetings and goodbyes, if you accidentally get my name wrong or say "I love you" at the end of the call, don't worry about it. We all talk to dozens of people in a workday and wires get crossed; really, it is no big deal.
- Learn the phonetic alphabet and use it. If it is good enough for every pilot in the US and the military it is good enough for you. If I have to spell something I will use it, and it never ceases to amaze me how long it can take people to figure out the the first letter or "Golf" is "G".
- If we have a bad signal, please say something. I will probably, apologize, hang up and call you back, but that is much preferable to the constant "What?......can you repeat that.....I think we have a bad connection." If you think we have a bad connection then we do, yelling into the phone is not going to fix it.
Texting:
Texting is the perfect medium for relaying short, one-way information. This is the best way to send me an address, telephone number or how to spell your name. It is also a great way to make a one line request; please call me, don't forget to mail that, I'm running late. If you need to give me information, and no response on my part is necessary, texting is the way to go. Text is not a conversational medium, if an exchange is going past two or three lines, the communication is better served with an e-mail or phone call.
