all-staff email protocol
Do you work in one of those companies with an ‘all-staff’ option on the email? Funny how everywhere develops its own unwritten code about what is and isn’t OK to send to everyone (official announcements? Daft virals? Local news?) and for whom it is and isn’t acceptable to send them. One such instance arose within W+K recently, where a number of all-staff transmissions from one person, known henceforth as Mr X, elicited the following response:
Apparently it is time, once again, to teacheth the lesson.
Dear Mr X, there is a certain protocol for sending out the agency-wide e-mails. First, you must have worked here long enough. However long you have worked here, it is not long enough. Certainly, not long enough for you to send, what, five agency e-mails in the last week or so? Second, your e-mail must be very, very well received/entertaining. A subjective matter, no doubt, but this point is moot now since you severely fail to meet the first criterion.
You may be at this point thinking that you are reading a cruel and undeserved spanking. How far this is from the truth. (Mr X) boy, there was a time when by now you would have been beaten to a bloody pulp by dozens of e-mail enforcers, hung by an anti-"trying too hard" posse, shotgunned by acid-coated emoticons of birdshot. 😮
Yes, you are getting off much too easily, Mr. "Look at me! I can send an e-mail and now you’re all my friends! Hugs at my desk at 5:00!"
Will others join me in my condemnation of your undeserved freedom on the all-agency highway? Perhaps. Perhaps not. (Most often, it arrives in the form of "Who the fuck is Mr X?")
Time will tell. And rest your fingers, good man.
What do you reckon? Harsh? Fair? Funny?
For the record, Mr X came back with a pretty good one-liner:
I hope you’re an art director because your writing is shit.
