NZ woman sacked for SHOUTY EMAILS

mkey..

What happened to the old whack over the head with a fire extinguisher while walking down the stairs?

@never quite got this shouting thing

"Text in capitals is a bit of a pain to read, admittedly, but I'm at a loss to understand why people get so upset."

If you only think about all-caps as lower case + 32, then sure, it's nothing. To most of us, it's discourteous, impolite, and unprofessional. Does that make better sense?

"Lord only knows what these fragile types would do if someone really did shout at them."

Often, that's part of the issue - these people would not behave this way in person - making their actions cowardly, which many people would also find irksome.

Blame RFC1341

It's all the fault of MIME, which ushered in our dark and tortured era of email with color, font styling, images, and the like. Back in the Good Old Days we only had block capitals and the odd ASCII punctuation mark to augment our feeble e-prose, and It Was Good.

Even full-on B1FF wasn't half so obnoxious as the typical color-enhanced email.

And while the latter are generally MIME multipart with a plain-text part, many people rely on the color channel for carrying crucial data - I've received plenty of emails with comments like "please see the part in red". So simply disabling non-plain-text is not, alas, always an option.

@Scott 19

<<Not as much as "You know">>

Don't I know it! Having been educated by an English teacher who was a total pedant (and I loved his lessons for it) I then went to Technical College (The Butts, Coventry - now there's a name to conjure with) where I was taught Computer Science - on a mechanical TTY, so I understand why *nix commands are sooo short, typing hurt! But he was the worst pedant - brilliant, nonetheless - who hated the expression.

He explained to the class, as he didn't have crystal balls, how could he possibly "know what I mean?".

few clarifications

OK, a few clarifications....New Zealand is not what the septics call an "at will" country, and the employers do love to advertise jobs as either casual, contract, or permanent, so the employers do end up with some obligations about notice and having good reason to terminate the relationship. For casual jobs this is of course minimal, a contract will normally have the duration built in, and a permanent role would logically be indefinite in its duration, barring misconduct etc. This is reasonable in view of the different powers inherent in the relationship, eg it is generally hardly one of equals. However, there is not that much bias in favour of the individual, quite the opposite if anything. For instance, had this employer chose to he could have simply made the position redundant. That does not mean that the particular work is not to be done any more, it just means that the work is being distributed differently across roles in the organisation. Meanwhile the employee gets four weeks notice and a redundancy payout. The latter would depend on the length of service, but would not be likely to exceed a quarter of what they had to pay in this particular case. Otherwise, they can give you warnings and then dismiss you if behaviour does not improve, or for serious matters like theft can dismiss you on the spot...but for both those cases they need to have their ducks in a row to cover possible challenges.

I do find the "shouting" convention interesting, because from a readability point of view all caps is more like mumbling...it is harder to follow and more likely to be ignored. This is despite being old enough to have received the odd telegram and telex message, which of course were always all caps due to the absence of anything else much. But in any case, I don't see anything about this particular example which is so egregious as to justify dismissal. Reading between the lines it would appear that there is probably fault on both sides. She may well have been a bit annoying to other staff, but unless the boss can show that he has tried to deal with this properly that is not going to cut much ice with the court.

@financial planning

She was talking about the legal costs involved, not the costs of living. Bloody idiot.

There must be more to life than this

Peyton wrote : "To most of us, it's discourteous, impolite, and unprofessional. Does that make better sense?"

No. Do people not exercise their judgement anymore? Has email rendered us incapable of 'reading between the lines' and appreciating variety, human expression and personality, or even finer subtlety and nuance? Does everything become black and white the moment it's committed to an electronic format?

If I'm turning a funny shade of purple and your ears are bleeding, it's a fair bet I'm shouting (rather aggressively) at you. If I'm simply talking to you these side effects won't be in evidence.

Are there no shades in between?

Do we get on the internet and think "lower case - reasonable, upper case - mad shouty bastard"? Just because it's supposed to be 'convention' that upper case characters are 'shouting', is there still not room for applying a little common sense and thinking for ourselves?

It reads to me like the lady in question was merely trying to emphasise the importance of something - not being rude, impolite, or offensive. Like I said, if I was an employer I would be seriously questioning the judgement, maturity and emotional stability of those who got their knickers in an etwist over a few capitals in an email.

But, as has been mentioned, I suspect there's more to this than just a case of misguided capitalisation.

It's not 'supposed to be convention'

It *is* convention. Just like a certain finger extended above the rest is considered rude - along with a million other gestures. Just like phrasing your speech in a condescending or sarcastic manner is considered rude. Just like shouting is considered rude. Shouting rude? No, I was just elevating my voice to make certain you could hear me, right?

Yes, if you disregard convention, none of the above make much sense. And yes, it is context based. So, no, shouting to someone who is hard of hearing does not denote anger. If I put LMAO in an email, no one thinks I'm shouting or being condescending. Reminder emails in all-caps, for most (and this could be a generational thing), have a different connotation.

@It's not 'supposed to be convention'

I agree with much of what you write here. It's kind of the point I was making. Given the great variety of expression and nuance that face-to-face communication affords it can be difficult to properly assess the written word - and it seems misunderstandings abound when we try to communicate via electronic methods.

What I question is the AUTOMATIC assumption (by convention) that capitalisation is the equivalent of shouting, or being rude. Here I've used it for emphasis, and I would hope that all but the neuronically challenged would understand this from the context. Even if, upon appropriate consideration, we do indeed decide a particular capitalisation constitutes a 'shout', it remains to determine what kind of shout it is. Angry? Exasperated? Aggressive? Emphatic? Jubilant?

As you've mentioned, context is everything. Even if the lady in NZ deliberately intended to 'shout' in her email we still don't know the full context. Maybe it's a lot of hassle to her to sort out late timesheets and she was exasperated. Maybe she was trying to be a bit playful and trying to convey some humour. We simply don't know. Even with the accepted convention I don't think we can jump to conclusions. There's certainly not enough there to suggest she was being rude or impolite.

If 'most' people consider emails in capitals to be 'rude' then I'd suggest 'most' people need to get a grip and some perspective. They're just some words on a page written in a different case, for heaven's sake.

I know some people take offence at the strangest things, but we each own our own feelings of offence. We can choose not to be offended if we want to. There certainly isn't a deterministic relationship between comment and offence. If people choose to adopt the convention that capitalisation in emails is offensive and rude, then I guess it's something we'll have to live with, but it really does seem to be a hugely trivial thing to get worked up about.

I think...

That excessive SHOUTING (ironic purposes aside) should have the same penalty as overuse/misuse of tech support with idiotic problems would have if I ran things: Forcible deportation to a remote island with no connection to the outside world.

@Mr Bear

>> Has no one noticed that she did say PLEASE. She deserves some recognition for at least using some politeness.

'Please' is polite, 'PLEASE' is patronising.

I reckon it is the employer's own fault, they probably made her fill out her application form in 'BLOCK CAPITALS' (that's doubly patronising). If they had made her fill it out in her own choice of case, they would not have hired her.

@Alan Esworthy

>> IMNSHO (is it OK to use all caps in an abbreviation?) (Oh, my! Is it all right to capitalize OK?)

Yes on the first point, no on the second, okay?

Alternative Viewpoint

Everyone here seems to take the view that the woman in question was a complete moron who shouldn't be allowed near a notepad, let alone a computer.

However, as more than one commenter has pointed out, when the entire e-mail is taken in context, it is outrageous that she was summarily dismissed (i.e. no warnings).

The alternative viewpoint of which my post title speaks is that maybe, just maybe, it was her office colleagues who were the morons, and she had been beating her head off of a brick wall for the past few weeks trying to get them to follow some rather simple instructions.

After all, everyone gets a little frustrated when others can't follow some basic directions.

As an aside, I always prefer *do not* to DO NOT. It suggests emphasis in a less confrontational manner. Plus, some mail clients make merry with things like *word* and _word_ .

oh

Is this the world we created ?

Font police next

Oh wait .....