Saturday, December 17, 2011

the unsendables

There's an e-mail I wrote yesterday for work that I cannot send despite it being perfectly worded. Sadly, sarcasm and business generally do not mix well. The subtleties of what make good sarcasm are difficult to properly convey in writing especially when some members of your target audience are non-native English speakers. The end result is that my three-paragraph masterpiece in response to being asked to do something that I will politely call non-constructive will never be sent. Instead, I will spend a day of my time (and another person's time) chasing down some "evidence" that a client claims to have proving some level of wrong-doing on our part.

The back-story to the entire incident would be funny because of how absurd the claim is but it has to be treated seriously because well, I'm not entirely sure why. It's akin to when the media gives equal time to two sides of an argument even though one side is some combination of wrong, ignorant, offensive or all of the above. This is one of the drawbacks to being in the service industry. Sometimes you need to politely deal with unreasonable requests while pretending they are not unreasonable. Thankfully, my time working for clients of a certain nature in Gabon taught me how to sit politely through a meeting while being blamed for something we did not do.

Anyway, my e-mail was half-informative (of facts I am sure they do not have), half-playful, half-mocking, and half-self-deprecating. If you add that up you can already see that those four halves make it twice as good as any ordinary e-mail. Alas, despite it's awesomeness, it shall never see the light of the Exchange e-mail server.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Send it! Let them interpret any which way they want. Their intelligence will not be insulted.