24 four hour "grace period" for emails

surfstyle

You know what I'm talking about here. You are at your job and reading emails. Things go along at a tedious and boring rate until: BAM! You get the most irritating and irrational email yet. Worse, it's actually sent to many with a request to reply back, "ASAP". You hit reply-all and go to town.

Though I try very hard not to let my inner toxicity show, here is a quote from a reply I drafted recently:

"OK. This has to be the most ridiculous idea for department meetings yet. We are already overworked and underpaid. And Jane (not her real name), I can't believe you think weekly meetings will help efficiency!!! Are you stupid or just on crack??!! Has it ever occurred to you that if we had less of these STUPID emails to answer, we would get more work done??!!! Anyone who actually goes to this meeting is an idiot and a loser!

Best,

Maggie"

respres

Of course, I said, "draft" because there is no way this should have been sent out. I gave it the 24 hour furious grace period and edited it a bit:

"OK. I agree we need to have department meetings regularly, but I have to respectfully disagree that weekly meetings are the way to go. Correct me if I'm wrong here, Jane, but I think last year we agreed that scheduling large of chunks of time for paperwork increased efficiency. Given that, wouldn't it make more sense to schedule these meetings biweekly so we could still have larger amounts of time for paperwork on those off-weeks? Just a thought. Can we dialogue about this (via email) before the next meeting, though, so I know if anyone else is on the same page? Maybe I'm just off with all this.

Best,

Maggie"

I got more people coming out of the woodwork agreeing with me and thanking me for reminding them about our earlier discussion on efficiency. We ended up with having the biweekly meetings, thankyouverymuch!

Had I sent the former, I would now be looking for a new job and probably not finding one.

Darren Foreman

I actually keep some drafts in my personal email folder for up to a year before sending them. Those involve family emails that are just short of telling some relatives to eff off, due to the disrespectful/non-supportive/dishonest email I received from them. I feel that is important enough to wait a VERY long while to edit and then send.

On the other hand, I usually gather all my bitchiness about me when I faced with a customer service issue via email. I have really let some companies get my worst thoughts with a 'cc' to whatever corporate office they have. However, to be completely honest, I'd rather have it out with them on the phone than via email. It's much more fun and natural to be an irate customer using tone of voice and volume.

Does anyone else subscribe to a "grace period" for nasty emails?