Yesterday, I had a serial violation committed against me that should have wound up with someone in jail. I was emailed, then immediately called before the ink was even dry on the email. That’s a metaphor, but you get it. With modern technology, there are more ways than ever to contact people, so here are the rules that must be followed.
Thou shalt not email, then immediately call. Just call. Or just email and wait, oh, maybe like more than 94 seconds.
Thou shalt not end a line of communication, then strike up another. Many moons ago, when I was single, I was talking to a girl and the conversation was dead in the water. I was mercifully able to kill it off and jumped on Facebook to send a message. I immediately saw her IM me on Facebook – “Hey, saw you’re online!” Another 30 minutes of mundane nothingness later, I permanently disabled the IM feature.
Honor the method of communication used. Don’t Facebook message me, then text me follow up and leave a voice mail. When I try to remember what I’m supposed to follow up on, I now have to search 12 different areas of conversation to find what the hell we were talking about.
Thou shalt not delete text messages with 24 hours of receiving them and ask for the information again. I HOPE MY WIFE READS THIS ONE COUGH COUGH. Ok, that wasn’t subtle.
THOU SHALT NOT ASK A QUESTION VIA EMAIL THEN NOT READ THE DAMN EMAIL AND REASK THE QUESTION LATER OR THOU SHALT HAVE THE MONITOR DUCT TUPED TO THINE FACE SO SAYETH ME.
Thou shalt not send a read receipt email for an email that says “Thanks!” or “Cool!”
OK, there is only six commandments, but feel free to comment your own and maybe I’ll add more.