How to make every email funny, especially from annoying coworkers



  • I thought I'd just pass this along, since it helps me a lot. Whenever I need to read an email, typically lengthy, typically passive-aggressive, typically full of self-promoting half-truths, from an annoying coworker towards whom I am forced to share an otherwise professionally cordial attitude, I enjoy reading said email to myself in the voice of a Monty Python character. My favorites voices are basically any from Michael Palin (I think his voice is just funny on its own), Graham Chapan's high society characters ("Caribou: gone."), and the flamboyant TV personality hosts played by Eric Idle. It's always funny every time.

    How do you deal with passive aggressive notes from coworkers?


  • 🚽 Regular

    My coworkers are actually pretty good at keeping the passive-agressiveness (and general rudeness) to a minimum, so most of our crappy emails come from support requests. Although I am privvy to these support requests, which are filtered into a special 'support' email folder, I rarely am responsible for replying to the customer (fortunately). However, I do wonder how our support team deals with some of these. I tend to visualize them as Simpson characters and I divide the emails into three major groups:

    1.) We do a lot of preorder deals. People make their purchase and despite every page along the process telling them it's a preorder and they will not get their product until the release date, they will email us and complain that we did not fullfill their purchase. One of them even threatened legal action on the grounds that "We are legally obliged to provide them with their purchased product in a 'reasonable time' regardless of whether it's a preorder or not"

    I visualize these as either Really Tall Man, Blue Haired Lawyer, or if it's a female name, that high-paid executive character who appears from time to time.

    2.) There is the occasional customer who applies the post haec ergo propter haec fallacy on our software. You know the kind: "I downloaded and installed your software, and the next week my CPU caught on fire, invoked martial law in my town, and declared war on China. Therefore, that was all your fault."

    I visualize these as Cletus.

    3.) Then we have the folks who basically write a profanity laden tirade about something so petty or even something that's obviously their fault (such as "I FORGOT MY FUCKING PASSWORD AND YOU WONT LET ME LOGIN YOU FUCKING ASSWIPES. HOW DO YOU FUCKING THINK I CAN DO SHIT IF YOU WONT LET ME ACCESS MY FUCKING TWITTER FEED?!!!")

    There really isn't a Simpsons character that I actually visualize for this one, but I visualize myself as Nelson pointing and laughing, "ha ha" 



  •  I would prefer advice on how to deal with annoying co-workers who think that Monty Python is funny.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    I would prefer advice on how to deal with annoying co-workers who think that Monty Python is funny.

    Well, that depends. What makes them annoying?



  • @El_Heffe said:

     I would prefer advice on how to deal with annoying co-workers who think that Monty Python is funny.

    Use a basketball to put them out of their misery



  • @Xyro said:

    @El_Heffe said:
    I would prefer advice on how to deal with annoying co-workers who think that Monty Python is funny.
    Well, that depends. What makes them annoying?
    Thinking that Monty Python is funny.



  • @Xyro said:

    @El_Heffe said:
    I would prefer advice on how to deal with annoying co-workers who think that Monty Python is funny.
    Well, that depends. What makes them annoying?

    They think that Monty Python is funny and act accordingly



  • :|

    Where's Blakeyrat's jpg of "[i]THAT[/i] was the joke"?



  • @Xyro said:

    @El_Heffe said:
    I would prefer advice on how to deal with annoying co-workers who think that Monty Python is funny.

    Well, that depends. What makes them annoying?

    It's not thinking Monty Python is funny that's annoying.

    It's thinking their repetition of Monty Python quotes is funny that's so fucking annoying you want to shove a pencil through their eyesockets Joker-style.



  • Bring us a shrubbery!



  • @Xyro said:

    How do you deal with passive aggressive notes from coworkers?
     

    I amuse myself by correcting their spelling, punctuation and grammar, noting that if the office were a fourth-grade schoolroom they'd all be in the corner wearing pointy hats.



  •  @El_Heffe said:

     I would prefer advice on how to deal with annoying co-workers who think that Monty Python is funny.
    chicken-bashing, maybe ? erm... nevermind.

    Here (not generally in France, but where I work), the problem is different : nobody knows MP. So I quote it only in thoughts, which is terribly funnier. I'd *hate* to quote something popular here.


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