Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Recent Annoyances

In honor of George Carlin, here are a couple of things that piss me off:

1. Weekly seminar announcements in the form of .xls attachments with 5 pages (one for each day). This now appears to have been fixed. (I complained loudly that I wanted to receive this information in the main text of an e-mail.)

2. The following keeps happening over and over again with numerous different people: When I schedule a meeting involving N > 2 people and I cc the relevant people, I want the response to include them because their preferences/opinions are also necessary. Is 'reply to all' so hard? (I understand if somebody forgets on occasion, but why is this so widespread?)


Notice that (1) annoyed me immensely with just one occurrence, whereas (2) required multiple occurrences in quick succession to really get on my nerves.

2 comments:

Lemming said...

First, share in frustrations -- oddly #2 moreso than #1 though. I think I haven't had that happen so much, whereas the problem in #2 has been more obvious to me.

I've got at least one guess for a "why" on #2 though. A LOT of people have gotten badly embarrassed, at one point or another, with a reply-to-all that really should have been a reply-to-one, and so maybe the tendency is to default to reply-to-one just for safety? At least from a software perspective, this HAS been the trend over the last 10 years or so... all used to be the default (commonly, at least), and now it is not.

Mason said...

It's true that the e-mail programs will tend to ask 'do you want to reply to all?' to ensure that's really what one wants.

The ones who continue to deal with me will learn. :)