I think one of the better cultural shifts, at least in the US, to come from the pandemic is the number of people wearing masks if they feel even slightly ill and have to go out in public. Better yet, a number of businesses seem to actually mean it when they tell employees to stay home if they're sick, rather than perversly commending those who come into the workplace when they are quite obviously suffering and contagious.
Get vaccinated, wear a mask if you feel ill, you just want to, or you'll be visiting someone at high risk indoors. That said, and I know I will lose most of you here, it doesn't seem necessary for the general populace, when they're not ill, to follow masking guidelines when in public. I'm not a medical professional, so I simply follow CDC guidelines. To my knowledge, there isn't a mask recommendatiom for the general populace at this time.
Purplely anecdotal, but since our hospital system is no longer critically overburdened, and folks are mostly vaccinated, it has been my observation that the negative impact on people's mental health, that the isolation of masking and social distancing induces, is a greater risk to the health of the general public than Covid and its variants. If you choose to take additional precautions, that is absolutely your perogative and you should feel empowered to do so. It'd be great if we could have it all, but people have to do what's right for them to make it through another day.
Do ya'll ever wonder if single family zoning, and car-centric urban planning, are some of the primary factors behind modern adults suffering from rampant loneliness? Two environments renown for fostering friendships and social activities are university campuses, and seasonal jobs in remote locations. What do those two things have in common? Proximity. People work, eat, and play together. In another word, community.
In my experience, humans are simple creatures. We take the path of least resistance. For your standard adult, the concept of traveling across town to meet up with friends after a full day of work or chores is exhausting. We crave those connections, but the barrier to entry is too high. We settle for whatever scratches that itch with the minimal amount of effort. Typically that involves some form of social media or other digital communication. It's like grabbing that crappy packet of ramen because you ran out of groceries before your market day. It's not really what you want to have for dinner, but it's what is readily available so you shrug and eat it anyway.
This is all anecdotal and speculation on my part, but I'm curious if anyone else has any thoughts on this.
Thinking about it, there may be something to this. Up until a few years ago, all my more work correspondence was incredibly sterile and formal. Not a single exclamation point in sight. Nowadays, my communication is much more cheerful. Perhaps because I've become desensitized to all the energy from those damn kids, whenever I run into an old-guard style communicator I interpret is as insincere.
This. It's the presumption of a done/deal with no comment period. If it's coming from C-Suite, then yeah, I'm their whipping boy unless they are telling me to do something extremely stupid in an area where I am the subject matter expert (then I just get it in writing that this is a terrible idea that I advised against and do it anyways because they own me). However, what I'm referring to are the individuals that have no grounds to assume they can issue me any sort of directive.
Yeah, my own fault for not including the proper details. If you're interested, you might find some clarity in this response.
I don't know that this will have any impact on your opinion, but here's a reply that provides the context I should have included in my original post.
Yeah, it's my own fault for not providing enough context. You are 100% on the ball that this is not regarding an email sign-off. Allow me to remedy the lack of appropriate context.
I'm the IT person at my org. The latest incident that sparked this post was a member of our sales team shooting me a message of, "Hey, send me a new pair of AirPods. Thanks." There's a couple of things wrong with approaching me that way:
- Any request, especially hardware requests, need to be submitted as a ticket so that there's a paper trail. It's a well established procedure. If you scroll back in our message history, it is almost exclusively them attempting to bypass the ticketing system and me responding to the tune of, "Hey! Happy to help. Shoot me a ticket at https://link-to-our-ticket-system.com and I will assist you as soon as I can!"
- Nearly anything that comes to my desk, that isn't a technical issue, is a request that needs to be put through the review process, and approved or denied based upon its merit.
Interactions along that line aren't unique, or tied to any specific individual. It's typically a percentage of any employee pool I have ever been a part of. It's the presumption of a done deal that grinds my gears, but I don't have the perspective to guess at their thought process so I was curious if I was missing something. Anyways, thank you for your thoughtful response. It is greatly appreciated.
Have any of you encountered the folk, typically in a work environment, that whenever they contact anyone, it’s always something along the lines of, “Insert monotone request or statement. Thanks.”
If you do this, or know individuals who do this, what’s the intent behind this style of communication? In my experience, it usually originates from individuals who consider themselves a bit of a VIP. They aren’t necessarily bad people, but are usually either trying to skip proper channels for a request, or correcting someone while having no idea what they’re talking about.
**See this response for additional context.