No one ever talks to me anymore. They text me instead of calling me on the telephone. They email me instead of walking down the hall to my office. I can’t decide if they’re busy or lazy or if they just don’t like me anymore. Of course, now that I’ve called them lazy, they probably don’t like me anymore.
At any rate, it feels like everyone is avoiding me. What’s more, it feels like I’m avoiding them. And if we’re all going to avoid each other, we ought to at least be nice about it. So today I’m going to discuss electronic etiquette. I haven’t been texting long enough to give you many rules about it. But I do have two:
1. Don’t text and drive, especially if you’re driving on the same road I’m on.
2. And don’t text me while we’re in the same room – unless it’s a very large room and you’re saving me a seat up front.
My own preferred method of avoiding face-to-face conversation is email. I don’t mean to brag here, but that’s because I type really fast – way faster than I text. Faster than I think too, which can be dangerous. So I try to keep the following rules in mind when I email.
1. Email communication can’t convey facial expressions and voice inflection no matter how big you smile while you type. That means even innocent messages, like “What a dumb idea!” or “What were you thinking?” can come across harshly even if you meant them in the nicest possible way. Some people add little smiley faces to ease the pain, as in, “What a dumb idea! 
” But that doesn’t always work –
at least it doesn’t always work when I get that message. That’s why it’s important to choose your words carefully, for example, “I’m very sorry, but, in my opinion, that is a dumb idea!”
2. IF YOU WRITE IN ALL CAPITALS, IT LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE ANGRY. So avoid it – unless you are angry. Then add a bunch of exclamation points too.
3. Remember, even some very smart people don’t know all the shorthand that’s out there. Me, for example. If I had known long ago that IDK means “I don’t know,” I could have saved myself a lot of typing over the years. And I’m embarrassed to admit it, but it took me the longest time to figure out that LOL means laugh out loud, partly because what people LOL about isn’t always that funny. Maybe they don’t know what it means either. There was I time I thought it meant “lots of luck.” So when friends bought lottery tickets or applied for jobs, I wished them LOL. I’m sure this did wonders to boost their confidence before the job interview.
4. Use a catchy subject line that gets attention and sums up your message. But be careful you don’t sound like a spammer. That means you can never say, “Grow rich beyond your wildest dreams” or “Get a college degree without studying,” though I’m not sure why you would say that.
5. This is just my opinion, but don’t put privacy messages on your email. If you ask me, there is no better way to get the whole world to read something than putting the word “CONFIDENTIAL” on it. In fact, I›m thinking of starting all my columns with it.
6. When all else fails, pick up the phone. I recently spent a morning in an email conversation that went something like this:
“What day works for you?”
“How about Saturday at 9?”
“No, Saturday doesn›t work.”
“How about Sunday?”
“What time Sunday?”
“Eleven?”
“I can’t at 11. How about 1?”
What I should have said was, “What is your phone number?” or rather, “WHAT IS YOUR PHONE NUMBER?”
(Dorothy Rosby loves email from readers, even if it is in all capital letters. Contact drosby@rushmore.com or see www.dorothy
rosby.com.)
