Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (15 page)

• Moochstarter and other sources of crowdfunding

A guy messaged me on Facebook, “How the heck are you? Do you still have that pink Nash?” He was referring to the cotton-candy-pink 1960 Rambler/four-wheeled money pit I drove when I moved to Los Angeles—in the 90s. When he messaged me, I hadn’t had it for ten-plus years—about as long as it had been since I’d heard from him … until he contacted me to ask me to pay into his Kickstarter fund to finance the distribution of some indie film he’d made. My response: “I would like to get a new pair of boots. Please send me $200 via PayPal.”

It’s the rare person who would do what he did face-to-face—be in a restaurant, spot some person they hadn’t seen for ten years, and go over and hit them up for 50 bucks. But, online it takes little effort for people to moochspam everyone whose e-mail address they ever came upon—falling back on what’s technically possible as the standard for their behavior and assuming that if the technology exists, it must be cool to use it to mass-milk everyone in their address book.

Sure, some of these crowdfunding requests are for noble causes or—occasionally—ventures that might someday turn a profit for those who invest. And I don’t get all miffy when close friends e-mail me about causes or projects they’re trying to fund. But for vanity projects—those unlikely to pay off in any meaningful way for anyone but the creator—I think it’s in bad taste to ask for what amounts to friend-and acquaintance-supplied welfare. This is too often requested by people who would simply rather spend
other
people’s money—and try to get the opportunity to do that by (consciously or unconsciously) preying on people’s fears of seeming stingy or having their refusal to donate held against them. If you have a vanity project, perhaps consider funding it the old-fashioned way: by working long hours at some dull job until you can pay for it yourself.

“You’ve Got Hail!”: The nonstop storm of e-mail.

If it were as easy to snail-mail a letter as it is to send an e-mail, the entire United States would be deforested in a week.

It was really cool to get an e-mail back in the 90s, when it was a novelty. These days, some people get fifty or more e-mails an hour. Some of these people are in competitive fields and have bosses who expect them to answer at all hours. But even people in less competitive jobs often open their inbox dreading the flood.

In other words, the guideline for considerate emailing is best summed up by the cartoon owl in the old Forest Service ads: “Give a hoot!—Don’t pollute.” This isn’t to say you shouldn’t e-mail. It’s sometimes the best way to get a particular message across. Just recognize that every e-mail you send eats a tiny bit of the recipient’s life, and combined with all the other e-mail they get, the life-eating can add up. Considering that, I offer a few guidelines:

• Recognize the beauty of brevity—in your e-mail body and your “To:” line.

Take the time to say it short. Of course, the shortest e-mail of all is one that is never sent—and never cc’d or bcc’d. So, think twice about whether saying thank you to their thank you to your thank you is really necessary. And before you copy six of your co-workers (who will all likely be copied on every reply), consider whether you really need to cover your ass six ways to Tuesday.

• Subject: Don’t make people guess the subject of your e-mail.

Guessing games can be a fun way to pass the time on long car trips, but they put stress on the recipient of your e-mail. In writing your subject line, keep in mind that e-mail is a form of communication, not a game of hangman. Also, if you’re quick to complain about not getting a speedy reply, be mindful that you’ve got competition for a person’s attention. For example, if you’re emailing me for advice, the subject line “advice” does nothing to suggest that your question is interesting and should be opened before all the other advice requests waiting for me. Specificity in the subject line, however—“Should I tell my wife about my diaper fetish?”—piques my interest.

• Don’t send three e-mails when you can send one.

When you’re emailing someone a bunch of information—times, dates, questions in need of answering—take care to gather it all together in a single message so you won’t have to e-mail them three more times with bits you forgot … basically reassigning them the task of pulling together the information you should have before hitting
SEND
. If, after sending, you realize you’ve forgotten something, go back to the e-mail you sent, include the forgotten bit at the top, resend, and note in the subject line that the person should ignore the earlier e-mail.

• E-mail people you do business with during business hours.

Many people get their work e-mail on their phone, and many use a single e-mail address for social and business e-mail. Just seeing a work e-mail pop up after work hours can cause work to eat into the life sphere. Patience is not one of my natural virtues, but I am always mindful that the woman who edits my column, the guy who copyedits it, my agent, and my book editor should all have time off when it’s time to have time off—no matter how desperately I long to e-mail them about something at 8:37 a.m. on Sunday.

• Help people who e-mail you respect your time by announcing your e-mail boundaries.

These suggestions are mainly for people in jobs with a lot of client or customer contact but can be retooled to be useful to anyone with a psycho friend or family member who expects a response twelve seconds after they’ve sent an e-mail:

—Squash the absurd expectation that you will answer e-mail whenever it comes by adding a line just above your e-mail signature: “E-mail will be answered during business hours, from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.”

—Adopt standard times each day to check e-mail, and announce them with: “I check e-mail at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and can be reached at 555-555-5555 in case of emergency.”
²⁴

—Announce a deadline for responding: “I’ll do my best to answer all e-mail within X hours” (24 hours, 48, 72, etc.).

• When you can’t respond promptly, just say so.

The difference between an asshole and an unfortunately busy person is often a tiny bit of information—for example, responding to an e-mail with “Got this. Swamped. Will respond as soon as humanly possible.”

• Technology makes a nearly instant response possible; it doesn’t mandate it.

When you have emailed someone but haven’t gotten a reply, don’t immediately go scramble the fighter jets. Consider that the person you’ve emailed may be overwhelmed, on vacation, or in a vegetative state or may have changed their e-mail address or neglected to check their spam folder. Check that you sent the e-mail to the right address, e-mail them again, or pick up the phone and tell them you’re wondering whether they got your message. It’s very possible their mail server has become convinced that you’re trying to enlarge their penis and not their income with a freelance job.

• It’s called “e-mail,” not “soapbox.”

As on Facebook, avoid trying to “cure” someone’s political point of view by barraging them with yours, and don’t be sending your meat-eating friends articles about how their lunch is killing them and the planet.

• Go ahead and use “u,” “ur,” and “n stuf” in e-mail—if you are twelve and emailing your BFF.

If you are twenty-two and emailing your professor or if you are forty and emailing another adult you are not having sex with, take that extra millisecond to tap out the “yo” before the “u.” Personally, I don’t even use text-speak when texting, because I’m terrified of it leaking into my writing. And besides, as “The Jingoist,” one of my blog commenters, noted, “how much time did you really save by typing ‘how u bin?’”

Accordingly, it’s considerate when emailing to put in that tiny bit of extra effort to write in complete sentences, complete with a capital letter at the beginning of each and attention paid to grammar throughout.
²⁵
People have enough e-mail to read that they don’t need e-mail to decipher. Also, keep in mind that grammatically sloppy e-mails can send an unintended message. For example, a common error in emailed hate-rants, “your an idiot,” tends to convey that
you
are an idiot, or at least not all that literate, turning what was supposed to be a withering attack into a source of amusement for the target.

• How to stop annoying forwards

If it’s your grandma sending you forwards—especially if she sends really good dirty jokes—take two seconds to send her back a smiley face or “I love you, Grams!” and let that be that. With anyone else—like those who consistently neglect to check
Snopes.com
before forwarding you something about the supposed danger of dying in a gang initiation involving flashing headlights—make your request that they quit sending forwards about the
volume
of messages you get instead of the asinine content of theirs, which should make them less likely to take it personally. For example:

I am just deluged with e-mail, so I have to ask you to kindly stop sending me forwards. Of course, personal messages from you are always welcomed. Hope you understand!

• “Choremail” is less likely to be answered. Ever.

Choremail is my name for e-mail that assigns some task, like reading and analyzing an article or piece of poetry you’ve written, to someone who is not your employee. Forget whether you asked them and they said yes. Immaterial. As I write in the “Communicating” chapter, many people will say yes to this sort of task simply because they feel bad saying no. If you must have an opinion on your writing, there are people who will give it to you. They’re called freelance editors, and they work for pay.

• Mass-e-mail failures: It costs no extra to bcc.

Bcc is short for “blind carbon copy,” referring to a method of document reproduction that predates not only the Internet but the photocopier. These days, it can also be short for what elderly great-aunts don’t know to do or careless e-mailers forget to do when sending mass messages, in turn exposing people’s private e-mail addresses for harvesting and sometimes announcing their presence in a group they’d rather not go public about being a part of. When somebody does err and send a non-bcc’d e-mail to 147 people, take care not to hit
REPLY ALL
, which will likely make a number of those people want to stop whatever they’re doing, hunt you down, and hurt you.

• Impose a waiting period on sending any e-mail you’ve written while foaming at the mouth.

I get it: Indignation wants to be free. So, when you get an e-mail you think is seriously out of bounds, you can go ahead and bang out your every enraged thought—
after
removing the sender’s e-mail address so there’s no possibility of sending it by accident. Once you’ve got your response together, give yourself a time-out before you send it—an hour or a few hours or even a day or days. Reread it and think about it and maybe run it by a wise colleague or friend and see whether it still sounds more like a righteous reply or a suicide note for your social life or career.

THE NIGHT MY IMAGINARY FRIENDS TOOK ME TO DINNER

In the spring of 2013, I had a fascinating dinner with two people who were in my thoughts a lot but whom I had never met. One of the two, an LA–based tech guy, has been commenting on my blog almost since its inception in 2002, and the other, Alaska-based FedEx pilot Jeff Guinn, has been commenting since 2008. Prior to this dinner, I couldn’t have picked the face of either out of a crowd, but I’ve read thousands of words reflecting how they think and what they care about. The LA–based guy once even came to my rescue in real life in a major way (though we spoke only on the phone and only for about twenty seconds). I would likewise have come to his aid, same as I would for others in my life I care about, because these online friendships are as real and legit as friendships I’ve made after saying hello to a person face-to-face. The medium through which you conduct the friendship really doesn’t change that.

Recognizing this, I have to laugh at all the Chickenpundit Littles wailing about the great harm that the Internet, smartphones, and social media are doing to all of us and fretting that all human interaction will eventually involve our pecking out abbreviated, underpunctuated speech with one giant index finger. Of course, ever since Socrates got his toga in a wad about how the
written word
would surely degrade our ability to think logically and sift out the truth, people have gotten hysterical about the latest advance in communication, predicting that it would mean not just The End of Life as We Know It but The End of Civilized Society.

The Internet
has
meant the end of life as we’ve known it, because it’s erased so many of life’s annoying limitations. For example, we three—three people who never would have met—had dinner and a very interesting evening together because Jeff uses his job perk of being able to fly for free to get together with the bloggers and blog commenters around the globe whom he finds interesting and treat them to a meal. (Thanks for the duck and the fumé blanc, Jeff!) What the doomsaying hysterics fail to see is that the Internet is a tool, same as a paring knife. The paring knife can be used to cut up an apple for a baby, to carve “B.L. loves M.C.” on a tree, or to stab somebody 300 times. Likewise, the Internet itself doesn’t alienate people. It’s the most amazing connector of humans we’ve ever had—that is, providing those of us on it have the guts, imagination, and good manners to use it that way.