Showing posts with label email. Show all posts
Showing posts with label email. Show all posts

Sunday 7 August 2016

Wrong Place Wrong Time - Computer Code Does Not Belong Outside a Program Unless It's Not Computer Code


This is just about an email that amused me but because of a minor dose of "political correctness" (ie you can't ask the person who raised the question to clarify what they mean, you must ask someone at your level or lower). This email had gone through about six iterations (it was probably 3 or 4 but 6 sounds better) before it finally came to me.

It was a request for information on how to do something in the email title , nothing major , a simple question , but terminated by a strange sounding TLA , which I think was the cause of the problem.

It went like:

"How do you do XXXXXX EOM"

It was the EOM that was the killer. It was an email and the only thing that meant anything to me was End of Month, so I emailed the originator who told me with a smiley it meant "End of Message" , which meant the the person's question became crystal clear. 

That was a bit of computer code being used as a TLA to end a sentence when a full stop or question mark would suffice. No harm was done and it made us all chuckle , but if someone like me hadn't entered the email trail trail , how long would it have gone on for ... or maybe that's why I was included as I often get things sorted. So it was a case of using something in the wrong place at the wrong time which to me is an obvious cue for Dr John's "Right Place, Wrong Time"

Sort of appropriate for the email trail
An Addendum to my argument is that apparently EOM can be added to the title of an email to signify that it doesn't need to be opened, so it was being used correctly , but no one on the email trail knew what it meant apart from the originator and now me.

It is another beautiful day so enjoy the wonderful weather and have a great Sunday.