Washington – You don’t have to tell Marvin Merchant about the hazards of
e-mail. The Maryland-based plumbing supplies employee found out the
hard way
when he typed an insulting e-mail message about his boss and sent it –
by
accident – to his boss.
Merchant had intended the message for his co-worker, Chris, rather than
his
boss, Christian. But when he began typing Chris’s e- mail address into
the
“To” field, his e-mail programme popped up a box listing everyone in his
address book whose names included “Chris.” Merchant accidentally
chose his
boss’s e-mail address. The rest is history.
“Luckily, I wasn’t fired,” Merchant told the German Press Agency dpa. “But
things never really have been the same between us ever
since.”
Life in the age of e-mail is fraught with such stories. And it’s no wonder,
when you consider how pervasive this relatively new method of
communication
has become in our lives. Recent estimates on the number of e-mail
messages
sent each day range from 2.2 billion to 9.6 billion in the United States
alone.
There’s no way of knowing how many of those messages are “mistakes” –
or get
the sender into some kind of trouble. But you can bet it’s more than a
few.
Even e-mail messages you think are harmless can be taken the wrong
way.
Electronics technician Katherine Ludke, for instance, found that out the
hard way when her family-only “joke a day” mailing list ended up offending
some of her siblings.
“I get lots of jokes by e-mail, so I decided to start forwarding them to
everyone in the family,” Ludke told dpa. “But jokes aren’t funny to
everyone. Some people took offence, and I had to stop.”
Mark Goldenberg, a technical writer in Virginia, is one of those people who
takes offence at getting jokes by e-mail – not because he dislikes jokes,
but because he gets so much e-mail in general.
“I tell my friends: As wonderful as you are, don’t send me your jokes, don’t
put me on your mailing lists, and don’t send me your electronic holiday
greeting cards,” Goldenberg said.
“When I come to the office in the morning, I can be staring at 30 e-mail
messages. If half of those are jokes and other garbage, I get cranky, no
matter how funny the jokes are.”
The simple truth, say communications experts, is this: the e-mail you
send
out can have a significant impact on your life.
“You need to by very mindful that what you say is memorialized in some
written fashion that can be stored, can be copied, and can be forwarded to
someone else,” says Andrea Johnson, a professor of law at the California
Western School of Law in San Diego, California.
E-mail can be the reason you’re fired or promoted. It can make others
think
highly of you – or it can make them think you’re a fool. Because e-mail is
first and foremost about writing, and writing involves and demonstrates
our
reasoning abilities, e-mail may be used to demonstrate our effectiveness
for
particular jobs.
“When you talk to someone,” says Johnson, you can call back and say ‘I’m
sorry’. Once you send an e-mail message, the person can look at it, go
away,
look at it again, and the interpretation, reading between the lines, is
where a lot of people get in trouble.”
To avoid becoming a victim of your own e-mail messages, take note of the
following pointers.
Think before you hit the “send” button. If you have even the slightest doubt
about whether you should send an e-mail message, don’t send it. Wait.
Reconsider. Re-word. Reflect. Remember: once your message has been
sent,
there’s no way to get it back.
Watch your language. Like it or not, when you write something, people
form
opinions about you based not only on what you say but how well you say
it.
That means you need to pay attention to such mundane matters as
spelling,
grammar, punctuation, and style when you compose e-mail.
Consolidate your messages. Don’t bombard people with lots of small
e-mail
messages when you know you must send several in a short period of
time.
Sorting through e-mail messages is a chore. Don’t allow others to view
you
as a nuisance.
Don’t mark your messages “urgent” unless they are. Most e-mail
programs
allow you to “flag” e-mail messages with special symbols that indicate an
e-mail message is more important than the typical message. Don’t use
this
feature indiscriminately; otherwise, you’ll end up drawing more attention to
yourself than to your messages.
Don’t request a return receipt unless the e-mail concerns a legal matter.
When you send an e-mail message with the “return receipt requested”
option
found in most e-mail packages, the recipient will be confronted with a
confirmation dialogue box when the subject of your e-mail message is
highlighted. The dialogue box will insist that the recipient select either a
Yes command button, which will send a return receipt, or a No command
button, which will not. Many users take offence at having to make such a
decision before they read your e-mail message.
In business-related or formal e-mail, avoid sarcasm, irony, or humor that
could be misinterpreted. Even in personal correspondence if there’s any
chance a statement you make could be misinterpreted, use a so-called
“smiley” or “emoticon” – symbols and punctuation marks used to portray
your
emotions – along with the text.
Dave Barry’s “Emoticons” site, at
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/davebarry/emoticon.html provides
a
useful list of the most basic emoticons, along with an explanation of each.
