OddThinking

I once found myself supporting a help-desk – handling the support requests that the help-desk agents themselves couldn’t handle.

While handling these requests, my motto was “contrite and smarmy”. I would repeat that to myself as I checked over the email responses. I wanted the users to know that I was concerned about them, and that really cared if our products had inconvenienced them. At the same time, I wanted them be left thinking that our products were great and getting even better.

I found myself using the same carefully constructed phrases in emails over and over. I looked at producing a list of hotkeys that could generate prepared contrite and smarmy pieces snippets of text. Microsoft Outlook’s mechanism for this is to define them as “signatures” but to insert them anywhere throughout the text. I went ahead and defined a few like that.

I didn’t realise that the last phrase defined this way becomes the default signature for Outlook.

So, every email I sent for a short while was signed by default as “I apologise for any inconvenience this issue has caused.”

I kind of liked it that way, and was loathe to change it.