If I may rant about office IM etiquette
I like the idea of using a secure instant message client at work. It saves on the number of times my phone rings, and allows easy communication of stuff that's a little too brief or urgent for e-mail. But now I'd like to rant, just for a moment, about IM behavior, since I'm not about to rant to anyone around here.
Complaint #1 - People who don't understand that IM conversations are asynchronous. Here's how the vast majority of my IM windows open:
(09:24AM) John Q Kickass: hi
And if I don't reply to that "hi," they never go ahead with their question. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, JUST TYPE YOUR QUESTION. THERE IS NO NEED TO ESTABLISH THAT I AM ALREADY HERE AND RESPONSIVE. Perhaps I'm on the phone. Perhaps I want to see what your question is before I get involved, as it might be an issue that looks like it's going to take an hour, and I don't have an hour just now. Perhaps I'm not at my computer, and will look at your message when I return. Perhaps I just get tired of people saying "hi" and not asking their friggin' question, so I maliciously ignore them. Typically if I ignore them, a couple of hours later I'll get:
(01:12PM) John Q Kickass: hi
And then a few hours later I'll get an e-mail complaining that they can't get ahold of me. All I can say is that it's fortunate that I lack the ability to fire people into the sun.
Complaint #2 - Professionals who use lolspeak.
(3:10PM) Rico M Suave: hi.
(3:11PM) Rico M Suave: r u ther?
(3:11PM) Rico M Suave: k gues i c u l8r @ the mtng
You're not sending me a text message on a difficult to use keypad. It really isn't a whole lot of effort to type out "are" and "you" and that way you don't look like a 12 year old.
Complaint #3 - Lolhybrids. These are the most mystifying. They are generally the older folks, who were previously schooled in proper grammar and sentence structure, and so they type out complete sentences with capitalization and punctuation, only they stick in random lolabbreviations. Are they trying to be "in" or something? I'm confused.
(11:45AM) Shelly S Proper: Hello.
(11:47AM) Shelly S Proper: I am inquiring about the work that U performed 4 us in the previous February. Is ur phone number in Lotus Notes not accurate? Please let me know what is the correct number to reach U at. We have been trying to get in touch for a week, LOL! I look forward to conversing soon. Thx.
Those ones just completely mystify me.
XBLive: Ruckus
Some of the reasons I declined to have IM set up on my machine at work.
"I learned 2 things today - first, I've got to use Mariano as my closer and second, I suck". - Francona after the AllStar parade in NYC
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Painful. That is why I usually keep my office IM closed. All I get are emails. I've been keeping my IM open lately though as I'm training some new guys and getting 20-30 emails from each of them everyday is starting to abuse my inbox.
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I usually get porn links. Get? Sorry. Send.
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"Truly, this mishap has set back the swamp sciences several years." - H.P. Lovesauce, lamenting a tragedy.
Our etiquette differs on your Complaint #1. The initial hi is always used as kind of a knock knock to see if the person is in a position to chat. If a person is sharing in a meeting it's a bit aggravating to see 10 IM alerts roll in. Not to mention if your message is personal in nature you might not want to broadcast it to a room full of managers. Granted, the person could go into a do not disturb mode, but that is rarely used.
Baba Ganoush1
-WAR, Iron Rock-
Flisriin, Zamfir, Ser
It's similiar here. If I send a "Hi", it might just be that I want to ascertain whether you'll be able to help me before searching for somebody else. Too often have teammates sent me urgent problems that I did only read about an hour later and started working on only to discover that somebody else had already solved them twenty minutes before I became aware.
And if I haven't seen further, it's because those bloody giants blocked my sight.
We use IM quite a bit at work, though fortunately I have not experienced the violations detailed in the OP. However, there is one fellow who seems to have the Library of Freaking Congress of smilies. And he isn't afraid to spam them like a Chinese gold farmer in Barrens chat.
Shepherd Book used to tell me: if you can't do something smart, do something right.
Work, what is this a website with some employment based word in the title?
*Legion* wrote:
I have no idea what you just said but it made me laugh.
Baba Ganoush1
-WAR, Iron Rock-
Flisriin, Zamfir, Ser
Even worse is:
Just a dot. Nothing else. It's the AIM equivalent of clearing one's throat and then waiting for everyone to look at you before speaking.
Or this, from a fellow sysadmin on our IRC server at work:
#2. #2 kills me. It is IM, it is english, it is written english. You would not type an email saying 'u' or 'b4' or 'c u l8r', so don't do it on IM. I love it when my 50 year old boss or 60 year old VP send me a message with 'u there?'. They are obviously articulate enough to type the correct word. It is not cool or hip, it does not save time. Type the damn word. It just makes me think less of you.
As far as #1, I sometimes do the same as you and ignore their 'hi', depending on how grumpy I am feeling that day. Even worse is the opening "I have a question" and then nothing. Should I reply "good for you"?
#4 - The "Can I ask you a question?" message. How are you supposed to respond to this, they already asked you a question. Sometimes, depending on grumpiness, I will respond "Don't you really want to ask me two questions?".
#5 - People who copy and paste your IM conversation and email it out to a bunch of people, especially if it is something you wouldn't necessarily want sent to them. 1. I was having a conversation with you, if I wanted all these other people to see it word for word, I would have invited them. 2. If you wanted them to see it, you should have emailed me and copied them so I knew who was going to see it.
#6 - IMs are not for 30 minute conversations which require 20 back-and-forth exchanges. Pick up the damn phone.
#7 - Turn off your damn IM during meetings, ESPECIALLY WHEN SHARING A PRESENTATION ON YOUR COMPUTER.
#8 - Do not send me 'clever' emoticons that are not standard on the company's IM. They are not funny, they are annoying and then I am socially-required to reply with a 'heh' or 'nice' or your precious feelings get hurt because I am not stunned that you figured out how to click on the menu option that allows you to add custom smilies and don't fall all over myself asking you 'OMG HOW DID YOU DO THAT??!?'.
I have a lot of IM angst.
This thread's proper title should be "IM angry".
Agent: "Why do you think she's known as the Black Widow ?"
Chuck: "Because... she's African American and her husband died ?"
You should just respond with "You just did. Good for you!"
Oh, and than turn off your IM.
As for #5 if someone did that and didn't ask me first? Punch to the face. If they asked and I said no and did it anyways. Punch to the face and a kick to the groin for good measure. That's just wrong! Does no one teach proper etiquette anymore?
"Can I have a job? I donut have much experiences, butt I always use an spellchecker spellchecker on my articles." - Sway
Using Prayer To Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria since 2005!
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No one in my office is this bad. At worst, they forgo capitalization. I think they all know I'd bitchslap them if they were as bad as the examples here.
Fedaykin98 wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
"RUTHAR?" is the bain of the work place. I just close any message from anyone who types this.
Also if you send me a "hi" IM I will close the IM client and not log on the next day.
Then again i'm an ass with no time to deal with morons!
WOW: Bounce
With the internal Jabber server we have, I tell people not to type anything to me that they would not want to be read back to them in court. Not because I would ever cut and paste it somewhere, but because it is all logged and I do wonder if someone somewhere reads them if they are bored.
That also goes for the LOLspeak. Makes you look very unprofessional and lazy.
It warms my heart to know that I am not alone in the IM wars.
Yeah, I think everyone gets bitten once by #5, either in e-mail or IM, and then learns the most valuable corporate lesson, namely, if you are about to commit to text anything about any other employee, assume some idiot will somehow forward it to them. I'll never forget the time when I was asked, confidentially, for my honest opinion of someone, and when I replied with some painful truths, they proceeded to reply to the person in question, leaving my text right below it. To this day I don't know if they ever paged down and read it, as we never discussed it. Seeing them in the corridor was really awkward for the next few months.
And #7, yes, a thousand times yes. You don't need to send me "hi" to make sure I'm not doing a presentation at this moment. Again, I made that mistake once, and have since learned the lesson of disabling IM or going DND before doing a presentation. We should not encourage additional silly behavior in order to combat other silly behavior.
XBLive: Ruckus
At my last job we had some douche who did #1 all the FREAKING time. It's just like...GET TO IT ALREADY! At my new job, they don't let us use IM at all, so I'm spared all this.
You made me spit on my computer.
McChuck wrote:
For some reason, our IT department can't (be bothered to, most likely) set up an internal jabber IM system or the like, so we go through MSN. The graphic designer we have on staff makes custom emoticons on request. *shoots self*
I usually only use IM at the office to talk to people I essentially sit next to. Anyone else, it's an e-mail, or a walk to their cube. Why? Because they don't like it when we make a lot of noise having non-work-related conversations, and I'd rather get up and walk every now and then.
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I think this carries into IM etiquette in general. I can't stand it when people type in lolspeak. My cousin recently got ahold of a computer (he's 13) and would type obnoxious messages to me all the time until I made it abundantly clear that he was presenting himself as an idiot. In general I won't even bother to talk to people via IM when I know that all i'll get is gibberish in return. English isn't that hard to type, do it right, or don't bother.
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At work I mostly use IM to keep tabs on my kids when they get home from school/jobs, setups for the youth group, a bunch of old coworkers, Enforcers, and some of the gang from here and various other forums.
With that kind of crowd, I try not to have any expectations in terms of spelling and what have you. I don't get much of it anyways; they know just how lame l33t/LOL is and that I'd spank them with my old IBM keyboard if they sent me that junk.
The only coworker I have on IM is actually also a former coworker from the old company and that's how we ended up connected. From her I'm far more in danger of getting a missive like:
KIOHAR 168.5.128.* SQL Error code 503814
Which translates to:
One of our partners changed their farkin' IP range for authentication again and the SQL server is throwing Level 1 errors like rice at a wedding. Get ahold of them and get the new range and then fix it and make sure not to forget to start and stop the IIS service after you do to make sure it takes effect.
Duoae wrote:
Yeah, see, that's much better than what I get, which is like:
(12:25PM) Bob M Mope: hi
Which translates to:
Holy mother of God my computer just caught on fire, and then the cord started sparking, and that started another fire which spread and took out an entire floor of the office building, and then when someone threw a desk to break through a window so we could escape, it plummeted 2 stories and landed on your dog's leg, and your dog is now in terrible pain and will die soon if he doesn't get to a vet immediately. So, if you respond to me saying "hi" RIGHT NOW then I will tell you all about this crisis, otherwise I'll just sit and watch your dog die, and send you an e-mail saying "well hell, I couldn't get ahold of you."
See? I'd much rather have what you have.
XBLive: Ruckus
I read the responses, but I still say the whole "Hi" thing drives me nuts. Just say what you have to say and if I'm not at my desk and my away message wasn't up I'll respond as soon as I get back.
Although the worst was when I worked at AOL. They would IM someone sitting across the row from them. No kidding. Everytime someone typed "r u there" a little piece of my soul would die. Educated people trying to reduce entire paragraphs into as few characters as possible.
I'd typically get something like this "do u think u will hv the app fin b4 eod?"
My response would be "Sure thing. As soon as I finish running my tests and get everything checked into source control we can do a push to QA."
I desperately tried to introduce them to silly things like complete sentences and capitalization. Hell, I'm not a spelling guru or grammar nazi, but I at least try. I felt less articulate after I left that contract.
Unfettered Blather - Daily updated nonsense
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Less chatter more splatter!
You hypocrite! You abbreviated QA!
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The irony was not lost on me when I wrote that
Unfettered Blather - Daily updated nonsense
X-Box Live Gamertag - CrazedJava
Less chatter more splatter!
Our company is very spread out, so we use IM all the time. Someone violates #6 occasionally, but the majority of the time it's a "you there?" followed a few seconds later with the question they wanted to ask.
I have to add another complaint though:
#9 - D-bags who use the 'nudge' feature. We had a VP who would use it--repeatedly--if he thought you weren't getting back to him fast enough.
Have you ever tried responding with something similar but so convoluted that even you might not understand? My guess is the next response will either be a question mark which you can respond with "exactly!" or they may pretend to understand and than never ask you another question again.
It's too bad it's a VP, if it were another co-worker you could walk up to them and just start physically nudging them repeatedly to see if how they liked it.
"Can I have a job? I donut have much experiences, butt I always use an spellchecker spellchecker on my articles." - Sway
Using Prayer To Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria since 2005!
Spoiler Fanatic!
That's because I didn't include the full text where you translate "get ahold of them and get the new range" to hours of phone jockeying my way up the chain trying to convince the partner that a) IP addresses exist, b) they're on THEIR network, and c) that someone -- probably in IT rather than the head partner's secretary's office which is where you sent me when we spoke 5 minutes ago -- did in fact change them and d) their users won't get in if they don't accurately tell me what in the Sam Hill they did so just saying, "I think we might've bought a few more" doesn't cut it.
Once I have the numbers I get to actually fix the authenticator (which takes about 10 seconds by the Query Manager timer), DS the updated tables to all the servers, get together and then recompile the two DLL's that can't pull this out of the database because they're on distributed systems plus some other sundry code I need and put up the maintenance warning message. Zero hour happens, I drop the code to the IIS server, the DLL's to the distribution system, bump the server and BVT.
Lather, rinse repeat if the guy in section d) above didn't give me the correct new range and it still doesn't work. And if you think I get to skip doing a), b), and c) again you're a right optimist.
Then once I get it right I get to field 2nd Tier customer support phone calls from every Tom, Dick, and Harry who got their session interupted by the server bump and even though they saw the message thought I actually meant next Tuesday and now they're going to sue me for some abstruse legal reason. Have I mentioned all our customers are lawyers?
Duoae wrote:
*BING* 9th Circle Of Hell: anal warts, itching powder, syphilis, alternative minimum tax and any corollary service industry support to law professionals.
Rock Band Name Generator!... too funny to merely be coincidence.
"Truly, this mishap has set back the swamp sciences several years." - H.P. Lovesauce, lamenting a tragedy.
14:22: [shihonage] hi
14:23: [shihonage went offline]
17:58: [shihonage went online]
17:58: [shihonage] hello any1 in this thread ? r u there ?
17:59: [shihonage went offline]
Agent: "Why do you think she's known as the Black Widow ?"
Chuck: "Because... she's African American and her husband died ?"