Expecting others to wait because you have loose ends to tie up causes entire schedules to slip. Early adjournment solves this by preallocating slack time for people to mentally shift gears, prepare notes, or travel between locations. Adopting a 50-minute hour for your meetings could save a great deal of time that’s wasted idling waiting for stragglers.

I am completely flummoxed that anyone who uses email on a daily basis has no idea what the common-sense conventions and practices of using email are, or just refuses to use them.

Here are some of my suggestions for business email. Ignore them and you may find yourself wondering why, at best, you don’t get replies to your urgent missives.

• Use an email client that understands and sends text. Not HTML, not RTF, not some wonderful format that allows you to WYSIWYG your way through decorating and emphasizing and cutesifying everything. Learn to use text.
• If you send me an HTML email, please don’t expect me to see your blue reply. As a non-member of the virus of the month club, I prefer not to indulge the world’s attempts to get me to electronically ingest any goodies that hit my inbox. HTML email is like a rat during the plague times. HTML email at work is like handing everyone you work with a rat and telling them they make great pets – during the plague times.
• If you top post, please don’t expect me to weed through the disorganized mess you’ve made of the sequence of conversation to try and divine the context of your reply, and therefore your meaning.
• Avoid emails that consist of “me too” or a single word reply while including the entire thread of conversation and your 15 line signature with the clever talking dog ASCII art. Go look up the concept of signal to noise ratio. When you send these emails, you’re the noise.
• Your email client has a quoting mechanism built into it that is likely to be able to save you from yourself, should you decide to let it. Typically the quote character is a single ‘>’ with multiples of these stacking up along the left side when quotes are nested. Don’t type in the middle of the quoted text. Seperate your reply text from the quoted text by putting a blank line or two between. If you really must reply inline, split the quotes up and again seperate your replies from the quoted text with blank lines.
• For the love of Pete, stop using Microsoft Outlook. Outlook and Outlook Express are the Dumb and Dumberer of email clients. If you insist on using Outlook, you’re opting in for the virus of the month club, as well as causing the rest of us untold headaches when your system becomes infected and spam the world with our return addresses.

As I stepped past him (only about 3 feet away) I stole a glance leftward and knew it was he, the Godfather of Soul himself. I did the only thing I could think of; I kept walking, and told everyone at work about it afterward. Sure, I could have stopped to shake his hand, tell him he’s great, say something profound like “You’re James Brown!”; but in the final analysis, I don’t feel I could have summoned up the level of cool it would take to just stop and talk to the man on the sidewalk, as if we’d just bumped into each other outside our normal schedule and I’d see him for lunch on Friday as usual. Maybe next time, James Brown. Maybe next time.

So in three days my family will have their first boring funeral. The “fun” has left the building along with Elvis (whom I don’t believe is dead but that is another story). My Uncle Jr was the one who tripped up my father’s coffin as it was being wheeled through the church to be carried outside causing it to lurch, he was the one who picked my grandmother out of the coffin at the church during her’s, climbed in with my great grandmother (although to be fair… I could have those two inverted), the reason we didn’t have an open coffin for my Aunt Glynnus (security reasons) and oh yeah…the stunts at the funeral home. Who can forget the time he assaulted my dad’s gurney to see if his arm had been severed by the drunk driver. Or when the vapors hit him at my Aunt Glynnus’ funeral and he wasn’t able to come back. Granted he was only the Offencive team, Glynnus was Defensive. She would have convultions and the pharmacy had a standing policy if we went to them and told him we had Glynnus at a funeral… we got 3 valium, no questions asked. She was the one to pick off key mourners and make it allll about her. All the poor woman got at her funeral was Jr getting the vapors at the front door, never even made it to the actual room. Now we won’t even get that.

It wasn’t even his fun at funerals that will be missed. It will be his suing of family over many tedious things including estates that still haven’t been settled and the first one to croak was ’64ish. The hospital can’t even prepare his body until they can go to his place and retrieve his wills and see exactly what he wanted. Oh and my favorite two which of course bring nothing but pride and joy to my grandfather (who I am sure is pleased naming his SECOND son after himself instead of his first…). When Jr got arrested for sodomy in a public place and tried claiming it wasn’t him since the blotter didn’t say “JR” and then after that declaring he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. *sniffle* Pride and Joy, joy and pride.

But really at the end of the day, the things I remember that make me overlook his stalking, and borderline child molestation is that when I was younger he would walk thorugh my Granny Fella’s house in wide steps filling the house with gospel music or showtunes at the top of his lungs, grow out his hair which was quite pretty and donate it to Locks of Loveevery time it reached his middle back and when push came to shove he was at Pol’s wedding to be an usher because it was the right thing to do when his aunt asked him. When it would have been easy to not be there for family or make it about him, he didn’t that day (he waited until the day after).

+)

Should anyone seeing the subject line and think this post was about them…tsk tsk. For truly in comparison to this man you are only a Tiff Princess *smirk*

I felt a lot better when the girl who borrowed the Sharpie I used offered to buy him a drink after he signed her CD and ran to the other side of the bar to talk to Ol’Soandso. +)