People Are Sharing The Worst Work Emails They’ve Gotten In This Infuriating Twitter Thread (30 Tweets)
Instant messaging and e-mail make our jobs much easier. Long gone are the days of running to your colleague's desk to have normal, face-to-face human interaction about your project. Now, we can send each other passive-aggressive messages and avoid each other altogether. Yay.
This Monday, Amber Sevart tweeted the ridiculous work-related message she received. "I e-mailed you 3 days ago," it said. Indeed, the person contacted Amber on Friday afternoon at 4:47 pm. However, they followed up at 8:15 am on Monday morning which means they technically gave her 28 working minutes to respond.
Amber's tweet instantly went viral, generating over 295K likes and 823 comments, many of which were written by people who also wanted to share the infuriating and ridiculous exchanges they had the pleasure to be a part of at work.
I don't know whether the thread they have eventually created is sad, funny, or both, but it sure does capture the toxic communication most of us have to endure while making a living.
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Such e-mails might be a hint suggesting there's something wrong with the company, too. Experts say poor communication between employees and management is another sign of toxicity.
According to a study conducted by SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management), nearly 3 in 10 employees believe their managers don't encourage a culture of open and transparent communication. When this happens, managers and employees seldom interact. Even when they do, the information typically flows top-down with managers giving instructions to their subordinates, who have no autonomy whatsoever.
To make matters even worse, when the communication is poor, the collaboration between management and employees might also be negatively affected and employees become reluctant to ask questions.
Research on leadership has shown that employees look at their leaders for cues on how to behave in the workplace. So, the communication problem between management and employees can spill into the rest of the organization. As a result, employees no longer see value in communicating and collaborating with each other. Instead of engaging in personal interactions, they prefer using other communications means.
Such as e-mails or text messages. It's a closed circle.
I sell on eBay. This happens to me regularly. People need something immediately, but only pay for the cheapest ground shipping. Then the messages start. "I need this by Wednesday" "can you mail this right away" "is there any way I can get this faster?" Ahhhhhhhhh. Just thinking about it makes me mad. Pay for the shipping service you actually need people!!
As a freelance proofreader, I get these projects a lot. I turn them down because they are always such small projects, it isn't worth the time to make an invoice.
Which when working from home I struggled with BADLY. Worked as a middle school secretary during pandemic shutdown, and we still operated with normal business hours. Because I was working from home, I was calling 80+ families on my personal phone. Cool, because they felt heard and appreciated on someone's personal phone. Shitty, because sometimes I worked until 8pm because I just... Was there. And people called me whenever their shift was off with questions about their kid and how school was gonna be, etc etc....
If you don't read or at least skim your received emails, you shouldn't be sending any
Yep. This happens to me on eBay as well. During the year, there is no shipping on Sundays, so I take that as my one day a week off from eBay shipping and messages. People will send 2,3,4 messages on a Sunday, and by Monday morning are full of ' i'Ve sEnT yOU fOUr mESsAgeS wHY HaVEn'T you ReSpONdeD??? ' (During the holidays, I ship 7 days a week, so this isn't an issue.)
Send an email at 11:59 p.m. on Friday. Send an email two minutes later - Hey I emailed you last week. Very unprofessional of you not to reply.
One thing I wish Facebook would do with is send reminders. I manage my work's Facebook page too, and if someone messages on the weekend or after hours, they get sent a message saying we'll respond during business hours, but then by the time I get into the office the next morning, I've forgotten.
Same industry as OP...same thing happened to me all the time. That, plus being told at the end of a 4 week project "oh by the way we need 3 other language versions of this 140 page book", expected to have them all finished in the same timeframe while getting blamed for typos in a language I couldn't even read (literally all I did was copy and paste what was provided).
I used to work for a US company, but I was based in the UK, they would always schedule a Friday afternoon meeting for 12 P.M. , so they could chill afterward, they couldn't understand why I'd be like, "Yeah I'm outa here, as the UK is 5 hours ahead of you guys !"
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the only response for these is to set an alarm to wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning and then phone these people up asking for clarification about something.
I used to do that too...sort of anyway. I'd reply to emails like that sometimes on Sunday evening asking for clarification and emphasizing that i needed to know by 8am Monday in order to meet deadline knowing that they all breezed into work on Monday's around 930 or 10am. Sometimes you have to make their problem actually BE their problem.
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The good thing is that more and more laws are been issued on that particular topic. I don't know for the US and their effed up social system, but here in Europe, it should soon be a felony to contact workers outside of their work hours.
Here in the US it's up to the company to make the policy. When i lived in Singapore, it was a free for all...it got to the point where i felt like they were doing it on purpose, dumping everything on me at 5pm on fridays (which is one reason why i relocated back to the states). But in the US, even though im with the same company, no one expects anything outside of working hours or on weekends/vacation.i have a company mobile, but almost never even pick it up or check it.
Load More Replies... And if you had a weekend out-of-office auto response, these people wouldn't read it...
the only response for these is to set an alarm to wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning and then phone these people up asking for clarification about something.
I used to do that too...sort of anyway. I'd reply to emails like that sometimes on Sunday evening asking for clarification and emphasizing that i needed to know by 8am Monday in order to meet deadline knowing that they all breezed into work on Monday's around 930 or 10am. Sometimes you have to make their problem actually BE their problem.
Load More Replies... The good thing is that more and more laws are been issued on that particular topic. I don't know for the US and their effed up social system, but here in Europe, it should soon be a felony to contact workers outside of their work hours.
Here in the US it's up to the company to make the policy. When i lived in Singapore, it was a free for all...it got to the point where i felt like they were doing it on purpose, dumping everything on me at 5pm on fridays (which is one reason why i relocated back to the states). But in the US, even though im with the same company, no one expects anything outside of working hours or on weekends/vacation.i have a company mobile, but almost never even pick it up or check it.
Load More Replies... And if you had a weekend out-of-office auto response, these people wouldn't read it...
