My last communication with my union, former-government supervisor was “enjoy the camping”, to which she replied like a human: “there will be much libation!” One ‘b-bye’ round and that was it.
The point: WE DO NOT NEED TO COMMUNICATE LIKE STUFFY ROBOTS.
We can ask “what’s the ETA on this” if that’s how we’d speak to people naturally and is in line with how they expect to hear us. We can say “I blew it, and I’m gonna need a week to revise all the things” (with the meme).
No shared history to guide meme use? Just be yourself so you don’t go crazy maintaining this act. Assuming your regular self isn’t insulting or rude, you should be good; if you’re not good, despite being a normal human, the job sucks ass and you should bail.
Another way of handling email … or most other communication like social media … especially if it is non-important information … is to DELAY your response.
Some people are addicted to communications and want an instant answer so that they can start a long comment chain of completely nonsensical irrelevant information just to waste time.
I especially like the start of a comment chain from someone who starts with just one word or short messages ‘hey’ … ‘hello’ … ‘call me’
I’ll purposely wait a day or two to get back to them and say … ‘oh I just saw this, what’s up’ … and if they response immediately … I’ll wait another day to get back to them.
Eventually, people realize not to contact me unless its something important and they give me enough information to respond back in time.
