EppsNet

• Office email: "Refrigerators being cleaned out tonight. Please take home anything you'd like to keep." OK. Going to stock up right now… #
• At a s/w demo, a user asks: "What are inheritable user permissions? Does that mean if I die, my permissions go to someone else?" #

We’re wordsmithing a confirmation email that we send out to new members of our association.

One problem I have with it is that we talk about our mission being to “enhance the quality of nursing care” and then in the next sentence we talk about members receiving “enhanced benefits.”

Do we need to use “enhance” in every sentence? What’s the difference between “benefits” and “enhanced benefits”? Maybe we could just say “benefits” and leave it at that.

No, our customer care analyst says we really do offer “enhanced benefits” above and beyond the usual benefits, so we need a synonym for “enhance” if we don’t want to use it twice.

I’m thinking we could say “improve the quality of nursing care” or we could say “boost the quality of nursing care.”

“Improve” is clearly better but I just love the sound of the word “boost.”

They’re not booing, they’re saying “boooooooooost the quality of nursing care.”

Just fired off a quick email reply: “oh good.” But mistyped it: “oh god.”

Someone asked me last week if the EppsNet RSS feed includes comments. It doesn’t.

So — I just added a comments feed and a Subscribe by Email option, both available in the right sidebar . . .

When Gallant has a question for someone, he walks down the hall and asks it.

Goofus keeps fruitless email threads going for weeks.

Here’s an excerpt from the comment thread on a trouble ticket regarding a database record with an incorrect status code.

comment 7563 posted by goofus on 2008-09-10 8:53 AM
I did change the status code in test and this did fix the problem. However, we need to speak with JS regarding this issue as to how this will be affected in production.

comment 7611 posted by me on 2008-09-12 9:15 AM
Let's get JS's response so we can close this.

comment 7621 posted by goofus on 2008-09-12 9:52 AM
Emailed JS regarding this issue. Waiting on a response.

comment 7637 posted by goofus on 2008-09-12 2:49 PM
JS is out of the office until Tuesday, 9/16.

comment 7773 posted by goofus on 2008-09-18 2:05 PM
Sent another email to JS regarding this issue.

comment 7794 posted by me on 2008-09-18 3:30 PM
You may want to consider walking over and talking to her.

comment 7800 posted by goofus on 2008-09-18 3:47 PM
Received a return email from JS and now will be working with MS on this issue. Sent her an email for her input.

I’m working with a company that uses Lotus Notes. It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve had to use Notes and it’s as bad as ever. It’s probably the worst piece of software ever released by a major company.

The worst feature — well, it’s hard to pick a worst feature, but one of the worst features — because I have to deal with it dozens of times a day — is the way Notes makes me reply to email. I can’t just click Reply and start typing. When I click Reply, I get a dropdown list of options and have to select one:

- Reply
- Reply with History
- Reply without Attachment(s)
- Reply with Internet-Style History

The godawful thing about this is that default options for email work 100 percent of the time. I always want to reply with history and without attachments, so why give me a bunch of options that I don’t want and make me explicitly select one every time?

Why would I not want to reply with history? If I’m sending replies without including the original email for context, most people send and get way too much email to remember what the heck I’m responding to.

And why would I send an attachment back to someone with my reply? They already have the document. They sent it to me. They don’t need another copy of it. But every day I see emails going back and forth across the network with multi-megabyte attachments because people have to explicitly select an option to remove it.

I swear to God this is a real email from a once-promising manager with degrees from Brown and Princeton, who recently accepted a new position as Chief of Staff to the CEO, and now uses her Ivy League education to put out emails like this:

Effective immediately please ensure that all written communications at [insert company name here] have a minimum font size of 12. In particular, [insert CEO's name here] has asked me to convey that he will be ‘throwing away’ any communication he receives (over email or on paper) that does not meet this criteria [sic].

Please call me with any questions or comments, and hope everyone has a great weekend!

I always say if you’re going to misuse the word “criteria,” at least do it in a highly readable 12-point Verdana font . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

It’s amazing how much havoc a person can wreak in the workplace by applying a certain kind of inspired idiocy to every situation: follow all procedures to the letter, do exactly what you’re told, and respond to all questions exactly as asked. One-word answers are ideal.

The latter technique is especially effective via email.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

I got an email today with the subject line

i’ve had eonugh of your bluslhit

This should be great!, I thought. I don’t know what I’ve done, but some illiterate has had enough of it and is now going to settle my hash!

Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be just another ad for online pharmaceuticals . . .

On this date in 1994, a message was posted to some Usenet newsgroups by the law firm of Canter and Siegel, advertising its services for the Green Card lottery.

Others soon followed in the footsteps of Canter and Siegel, torpedoing the usefulness of newsgroups with junk messages, which eventually spread from Usenet to email.

According to Brightmail, most email is now spam.

I get about 200 emails a day — 90 percent junk — and 90 percent of the junk is targeted at human weakness, weariness, disappointment, regret and self-loathing.

Continue reading Prescription Drugs by Email!

Today’s email brings the following inquiry:

Would you like a larger penis? Or for your spouse to have a larger one?

Hmmm . . . neither, actually.

This is a story about customer satisfaction in the Internet age.

Today’s Good Morning Silicon Valley brings this provocative item:

Problems with Webvan? Mercury News reporter Joelle Tessler would like to talk to former Webvan customers dissatisfied with the company’s service. If that’s you, please drop her an e-mail at jtessler@sjmercury.com

Is this for real?! Well, there’s one way to find out . . .

From: Paul Epps
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 2:35 PM
To: jtessler@sjmercury.com
Subject: webvan

Are you preparing an article on dissatisfied Webvan customers? How do you know they're dissatisfied before you've talked to them? Who can the *satisfied* Webvan customers talk to? I'm in no way affiliated with Webvan, nor was I a customer, but this doesn't seem fair.

Apologies in advance if I've misread your intentions.

From: Tessler, Joelle
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 2:39 PM
To: Paul Epps
Subject: RE: webvan

I have been working on a story about Webvan for about 6-7 weeks now (have spoken with more than 40 people who worked there) and I am learning that they had some pretty serious problems in the Oakland warehouse. Because it was so highly automated, things would break and everything would come to a halt. I keep hearing about orders that never made it out the door, orders that were hours late or cancelled altogether, orders in which half the totes were missing and so on. This is all coming from the couriers, customer service representatives, warehouse workers, etc. But just about every customer I have ever spoken to loved Webvan and I can't figure it out... If I can't find dissatisfied customers, I will say that in the story.

From: Paul Epps
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 2:54 PM
To: Tessler, Joelle
Subject: RE: webvan

Wow, what a quick response! Here's a theory for you: It doesn't take perfection to satisfy people where Web technology is concerned. They still have such low expectations that they're amazed when it works at all.

From: Tessler, Joelle
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 3:11 PM
To: Paul Epps
Subject: RE: webvan

Well, some of that was cut and pasted since I've had to explain this over and over... You're probably right. A lot of customers have written back to say they did have some problems, but still loved the service.