Robert KingettWho the fuck taught people how to pen business emails? Holy Christ on a cracker! Absolutely nothing creams my corn more than having to actively translate what these professional suits are typing to me. I just received an email that was 5 paragraphs that essentially boiled down to, hey, I really liked your report you sent last Monday. Can we schedule a Zoom call tomorrow? Yes or no? I am so tired of professional communications. I am frankly exhausted with having to translate professional sludge. Why in the healthiest of hell is it OK, even desirable, that our society likes this kind of mind nummingcommunication? Everybody calls it professional but I just call it a gigantic fucking headache. And who the hell came up with professionalism anyhow? I’m really starting to hate the concept of professionalism and professional writing styles. No wonder everyone has meetings. No one can write. No one can string together a competent business sentence without 90,000 corporate qualifiers. You can have perfect grammar and perfect spelling and in fact be the worst writer. Can we change what it means to write professionally? Because this is a level of hell that I never noticed prior to getting away from corporate offices. #Writing #Business
Lykso@WeirdWriter This is why business-brained people seem to like LLMs so much, IMO. "More words = better" for them. Much of what the suits do is merely performative; a gloss on a fundamentally unjust and corrupt system built to protect the interests of useless nepo-babies and other business owners. They write lengthy, empty emails because it produces the appearance of value and busy-ness for those who aren't so unfortunate as to have to *do* anything in response, such as actually *read* them.
@WeirdWriter The only "business owners" I've ever known to be worth a damn have been the owner-operator, small business types who started out doing the work of the business on their own and whose businesses haven't quite reached the point where they can step away from day-to-day operations. Once that point is reached, they become ever-more useless, even as they become ever-more prestigious.
@lykso Bingo! A part of me really wants to be inside of their head when they get an email like mine. Kind of short, to the point. Depending on my mood, it’s a little bit whimsical. For example, I recently wrote the phrase, I hope this email finds you eating a lot of grapes and other kinds of healthy fruit. Do they find it impossible to understand because it’s not filled with empty dribble and is 1 million times more actionable than a single paragraph they’ve ever created?
@WeirdWriter I think it's a mistake to assume they don't know exactly what they're doing. It's not so much a matter of capacity, for most of them, but rather a matter of complicity.