conrats

Evidently I'm having one of those days. You know the ones I mean, the ones where little things that you normally just shrug off get stuck in your head. Like a festering wound, oozing and burning, these little things just sit there eating at your very sanity. And you'd chew your own arm off to stop them from bugging you.

I mean, I spent about half an hour sitting at my desk irritated at the font the new LadyBoss has chosen for her e-mails. It's not hard to read, it's not blinky or overly stylized, I just don't like it. So every time I got an e-mail from her I had one of those gut "grrrrr" reactions and I had to repress the urge to just delete it to get it out of my inbox.

But I digress. It's a font, I'm letting it go.

Then "conrats" happened. And my world collapsed into a fuming pile of inconsolable irritation the likes of which my cat can't even replicate on her worst day. (And those of you who know, realize that's quite an accomplishment.)

"But who the what where and why?" you ask. Let me break my irritation down.

First, the initial salvo. Apparently there's a new Manager in another division, and someone thought everyone needed to know. So this nifty little "please welcome so-and-so," e-mail goes out to the entire company. Name, rank, and mini bio follow (mourners please omit flowers would probably be a little overdramatic, no?), and my irritating sh*%-o-meter goes up a notch.

Because I know they're coming. Its inevitable. They can't be stopped and one must endure the painful platitudes of... The "Reply To All" Addicts. All companies have them, all companies mock them, and yet they still exist.

Now my company, in the last six months or so, has had three separate training memos sent out about abusing the RTA button, but still I start getting the little e-mails. "Congratulations!" "Welcome!" "Glad to have you!" And so on, and so on, and so on. All the while the meter's climbing.

And then it came. The one-word, RTA message that had me halfway into a scathing e-mail on proper account usage before I deleted it.

"conrats"

This sent me over the top. How many e-etiquette rules have we broken? Let's find out.

1. Misuse of the "reply to all" button.
2. Spelling counts. The word is "congrats," and that's not even a word, it's an abbreviation.
3. While the usage of punctuation is debatable in one-word e-mails, I'm already irritated, so here we are.
4. It's called capitalization, look into it.

Now I'm as guilty as the rest of you when it comes to the last two, and I have my spell-check set to 11 to keep me from flubbing #2, but that's not my point. This is:

If you're sending an e-mail to a co-worker you have never met, how do you want to present yourself? As a professional, courteous, and intelligent resource, or as a lazy, ignorant, and inattentive slacker who tosses off an e-mail with the forethought of a drunk Hollywood Celebrity. Whoops! Maybe that's not the impression we're trying to make...

But enough with the rant. Its quiltin' tme