We’ve all been there. We have to ask someone something over email, or need to remind them that, um, they forgot to pay us this month. We don’t want to seem rude or annoying, and we can’t use our usual symbols of friendliness: emoji.
So we add in exclamation points (but not too many), start off with ‘I’m just writing’, and make sure to apologise if we’re being at all irritating.
Soon we’ve thrown in a bunch of random compliments and have said ‘sorry’ six times for the massive inconvenience of taking up their time with an email.
So we go back and cut a few out, spending a good fifteen minutes striking that perfect balance of ‘I’m not complaining or being assertive, don’t worry if you can’t do what I ask’ and ‘I’m also not an insane person enthusiastically yelling apologies at you.’ It’s a struggle.
And, as you may have noticed, this struggle… Read the full story