Commune-icate
There are a lotta folks out there who just don't seem to grok the essential concepts of communication. They think it's just about them, or they don't think at all. My hackles rise over a wide spectrum of failure, from the people who create forms with spaces that don't fit the required information, to those who haven't learned the how's and why's of email. And mostly, I can't stand people who don't hit the ball back over the net when it's their turn.
On a basic bureaucratic level, it is beyond me how people can solicit information and not have a handle on what it is they are actually seeking. They create forms where spaces are too small to enter the information. Not only in terms of the length, but also the height; some are so poorly framed that even with cheaters and a Number Three pencil, I'm pushed toward illegibility. On the other end of the scale, the sense of symmetry can be so weak that they provide a line several inches for a phone number. Ya gotta wonder if anyone was asked to test-fill the forms before they were printed.
This may not seem like a big deal, but it's symptomatic of a sloppiness in thinking that will cost them business, among the more astute professionals, and in our globalizing economy, that means it will be ever more difficult to make the cut. Kinda like what happened to the American automobile industry. They thought they could go on forever with their shoddy workmanship and built-in obsolescence. Hey, if you're not continually about improving your performance, you're gonna slip to the back of the herd, where the Darwinian wolves opt to dine.
Another aspect of inept communicating in business are the folks who still haven't gotten the email thang. Not just the spammers, although they should all be cave-crawling in Tora Bora, but the people who insist on auto-returning notes that say they've gotten my email and I can expect to hear from them. Why bother me with picking up and reading such a note? If I'd sent it to the wrong place, it would have come back to me. Just get back to me when you have the information I request. I mean, that's the raison d'etre of email. Similarly with the auto-responders that tell me someone is out of the office. I suppose they make sense, but they also seem an unnecessary nuisance to access and delete; especially when I see that I have mail, and am waiting for an important one.
Another e-communications rag is over the people who set up web sites, manage to put up a "Contact Us" button, and then channel it, apparently, into The Great Black E-Hole of silence. Folks, especially you who are trying to sell something, when someone makes an effort to contact you, if you don't respond, you not only disappoint them, you annoy them. This is not just small businesses, mind you, but large corporations as well. My presumption is that they hire low-brows to sort through the mail, and so the results are to be expected. Kinda like how our elected representatives do it, when their mail isn't infected. Unless you're a significant financial contributor, some drudge picks out a coupla keywords and sends off a boilerplate response that rarely has little to do with your missive.
Communications is rooted in the Latin meaning "common" which implies more than one party. It's important that the conveyance be bi-directional, and as efficient as possible. Otherwise, pull yourself out of the loop.
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.
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