Trenchwork

Ok, it’s not a small box; it’s huge.  HUGE.  And it seems like it’s popping up fairly often lately.

I have a soapbox about training folks to perform in professional environments.  Somewhere along the line, the idea of professional correspondence seems to have fallen out of a lot of organization’s training programs.  I’ve been doing the usual updates and renewals with financial and insurance organizations over the past few weeks, and doggone it, I really do expect that correspondence to meet a professional standard.

I expect basic grammar to be correct (e.g., use of the correct “it’s/its” or “there/their/they’re” and basic sentence structure).  I expect salutations and signature blocks.  I expect full answers to questions.  I expect the organization to recognize that a lack of communication (e.g., explaining why a product hasn’t arrived) is indeed a problem in their system, regardless of whether they’ve contracted the item out to someone else or not, and that they may need to address it as a problem rather than simply say that “we subcontract to X to handle it and therefore it’s not our fault.”  And I absolutely expect them to spell my name correctly.

I’ve just done a round of questions I certainly would not have needed to ask had the representative given more than a single sentence answer but rather provided full information in the first or second go, and I didn’t ask all the questions I’d have liked to simply because it was too tedious.

But I’d really like to know why have companies lost sense of the idea that just because they’re writing an e-mail, they can skip the usual formal elements of official correspondence (e.g., actually addressing the person to whom you’re writing, and signing your letter).   What makes them think that anything else is professionally acceptable?

Sigh.  I’m afraid I let my irritation show in the last mail and suggested that they might come up with an explanatory blurb which truly answers all the questions in one nice, neat little letter, and I probably shouldn’t have done that.  But doggone it, the supervisors of that individual should be thwapped—as should those of the one who sent a letter so full of grammar errors that were it not for the fact that it was a secure and closed system, I’d have questioned the mail’s authenticity.  On the other hand, at least I didn’t allow myself to remind them that they really should start the letter with a salutation and end it with a signature block.  So I guess I get half rudeness points . . .