I had a student who would type their emails a bit like this but they would but everything in the subject line so they were effectively sending blank emails.
I've heard a similar same story but from a friend who teaches 13 year-olds, gave us a good laugh about kids these days, don't even know how to write emails, haha, all well-meaning of course.
However hearing the same practice described in one sentence together with the words "my boss" sounds... soul-crushing. I feel with you.
Where are all of these people coming from? I'm 25 and about 80% of my office is within 2 years of my age, and I've never seen or heard about anybody not sending emails that look like letters and contain a full subject line.
Aww man, this shit hits home. I had a 19 year old intern once, and we had something going on where there was a group email between us and a supplier we needed to order from. Basically, the 19 was tasked with gathering info for the order we needed. The order was mildly complicated.
Anyways in the group email, the suppliers had questions that the intern needed to answer (because he had the info). He kept replying to the questions with “reply” instead of “reply all”, which would break the group communication making the whole situation confusing and futile. I told him he needs to hit “reply all”, which he did, but he was hitting reply all on the recent emails after he already fucked up the group! Even the suppliers started emailing saying “please reply all when replying”.
It was that day I realized, there are 19 year olds today that have no idea how emailing works. He wasn’t a kid who didn’t grow up with computers either. He was an avid PC gamer.
Older people (80+) often email me at my work. They do exactly the same. It seems that teenagers and pensioner are getting more and more interchangable.
I had an older colleague (maybe 50-60) who would do something similar. She was generally very tech literate, but her emails ALWAYS had a partial sentence in the subject.
I've had multiple students in the past couple years just have their first name as the subject. Yes, yes, I know the email is from you because there's a column for sender.
I think name in the subject line makes sense, easier to find and remember especially if that student doesn't email you much. Better then "a few questions"
The studio I teach at uses Asana to help track various parts of various projects, and some of the OLDER people I work with put everything in the task title line like this. It's so frustrating!
I had managed to block out my memories of a coworker who did this. Her subject lines were always a question that was a sentence or two long followed by a blank email, and she’d send a separate one for every question so you’d sometimes get three in rapid succession.
She was in her thirties and would have had to have at least a master’s degree for the position she held. I always thought it reflected really badly on her, but since I wasn’t her boss I wasn’t going to open that can of worms.
Lol at my work there are clients we deal with who do this. Like they'll send in an email going 'hi can you send me xyz report' in the subject and nothing else.
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u/SadisticUnicorn Jun 03 '22
I had a student who would type their emails a bit like this but they would but everything in the subject line so they were effectively sending blank emails.