The 80 / 20 Email Heckler

The 80/20 rule is so true, regardless of the situation. Work, troubles, car accidents..., you name it.

I witnessed the rule in its full glory today. We all have difficult people that we have to deal with every day. Some are worse than others. Well, I have "that one guy" that consistently goes out of his way to make my life miserable, which is quite odd, considering I go out of my way to avoid

Anyway, because of my place of work, email is so prolific that people seem to use it for everything and anything. One thing that I have learned for certain is that email is quite possibly the worst medium for general argumentative discussion evveeeer! You can probably guess where I'm going with this.

I'm officially labeling my argumentative co-worker as "the 80/20 email heckler ." The really funny thing, and I find this to be true of most email hecklers, is that they generally fall into two category of persons:

1. People that are very intentional and succinct with their words
2. People who pretend to be this, but really have no idea what they're talking about

The first class of person tends to be very mechanical, planning, and generally, correct in what they write. These are the people that take 30 minutes to write a paragraph-long email. If you try to call these people on their email statements, they don't hide behind them or deny them, the stand along side them and rationalize their thought process. These people are reasonable.

The second class of person generally takes 30 seconds to wing off an email, giving it no thought for things as simple as spelling or grammar, and certainly no sight into the political or emotional ramifications of their words. Remember, there is no "good" way to represent empathy in an email, which is why satire, jokes, and the like need to be kept to a minimum unless they're blatantly obvious (which is a topic in itself) or the recipient of the email knows you well enough that they understand what you're trying to get across without paying too much attention to your words (and even this fails most of the time.) Furthermore, if you call people on their statements, they'll deny them, alter them, and make it painfully obvious that the real content of the email boils down to "I don't understand what I'm writing or reading, I don't particularly care for your interaction, so I'll cower behind an email in hopes that I can prove how much more important I am than you." I.e., these people are unreasonable.

My solution: boycott email, revert to this device called a "telephone", drink heavily, and watch Office Space, quite possibly the greatest movie ever!

Viva la resistance!!!