Major Dick, the head of our entire division is a horrible abuser of email. If he wants info about a certain project for example, rather than email all of us involved with the project at once, he will send an email to each of us individually so we are working at cross-purposes all trying to respond. He is also a constant user of “LOL” when he hits reply, and he really likes ;) too. But these things are not what drive me crazy. The part that I absolutely can’t stand is that the man has no grammatical English skills when it comes to writing. So, not only are we trying to answer his questions, we may not even be providing him with the answers he’s looking for to begin with, because no one understands what he really wants. This often leads to email chains of 10-20 replies. I would like to add here that he is a 60-plus year old white male, born and raised in America – English is not his second language, it is his only one.
So much time is wasted trying to figure out what Major Dick wants. I've started not responding to as much as I can get away with, and now I get less emails from him. I still see my boss, Joker, jumping at Major Dick's emails, trying frantically to please the man, but I've come to my very professional opinion of "why bother?" If Dick truly wants something he can either call me, or figure out how to put a complete sentence on paper, but until then, I will resist the reply button! Of course there are times when I'm forced to reply and in those cases I try to answer his question in the same words (or less) that he uses, just so I don’t unwittingly introduce a new topic or open the door for more confusing questions/statements. To give you an idea, these were literally cut and paste from emails over the past 3 weeks. Mind you, these were not cut and paste from larger paragraphs, or sentences, these "statements" were the only things in the bodies of the emails. Sometimes he’s responding to a question we have asked, sometimes he’s asking a question, and other times he’s just commenting – although it doesn’t really matter if you know the subject matter here. I do, and that doesn’t help me . (Names have been changed, but otherwise everything is the same.)
MD: “Am not worried about the upload of the current, if we change systems doubt either it won't do the upload or be so cost prohibitive we would not purchase the upload…either way plan to wind down the existing BT or manual move”
MD: “K so Bank A and Bank B would be billed this month?” (Sent today, June 10)
Mingle Reply: "yes" (I didn’t want to introduce more ‘words’ or ‘grammar’ into the email, since I actually understood his question)
MD Reply to my Reply: “Being June or May?” (What part of “this month” in his own question was confusing to him??)
MD: “Sally: if they come in house with us with the web no issue, there is a product; no final product for them to take the web into their site....we will need Tim to coordinate, yes we have the old web with license banks, but not the new” (Again – this is not a fragment of anything larger)
MD: “Joker/Mingle...missed this one working backwards in my email...at least sally and I recall the discussion”
And for one that came today and sent me over the edge to write this blog entry:
MD: "Bob we are confuse, unclear to use where you are getting the type info not true to the work being delivered"
I sent this last one to Mr. Mingle who actually works with people to whom English is a second language, and he sent me the following response. Perhaps he’s onto something -
Mr. Mingle's Response:Here is Dick’s original statement.
"Bob we are confuse, unclear to use where you are getting the type info not true to the work being delivered"
I tried to guess at what I think he is saying, and tried to put it into plain English:
"Bob, we are unclear as to where you are getting the info which is not true to the work being delivered." [This, by the way was surprisingly accurate, I’m quite proud of Mr. Mingle for being able to translate Major Dickese]
Then I translated it into Korean, which resulted in:
브라이언, 우리는 당신이 점점 불투명으로 어디에있는 모든 정보가 배달되는 작품을 사실이 아니합니다.
Then I ran it through a different translator back into English, which resulted in this:
"Bra slang, us you this the work where all information where little by little opaquely in where is are delivered the fact is not."
I'm pretty sure this confirms that Dick is a non-native English speaker using translation software to communicate with you guys.
