Act your digital age

People who start emails with “Good day” can knit me a cardigan. Might as well keep going and do a nice little tea cosy for your motherboard. Although a certain amount of etiquette is required when writing a business email, it’s not necessary to throw the kitchen sink at it. When I’m reading work emails I’m probably not having a good day anyway. Nor am I in the mood to be called “Dear”. The universally accepted way to start a formal email is “Hi”. “Hi” is the standard; the norm. Not “Hey” or “Hey there” or “Hiya”. Just “Hi”. After a solid “Hi” you can continue and sound as formal as you like. Try to wrap things up in 100 words or less and finish off with a widely accepted and often insincere, “Regards, so and so”. Your regards can be best or kind. I prefer “Best regards” over “Kind regards” and just a simple “Regards” over the lot. Under no circumstances should an emoticon come into play.

Regards should end after the fourth email. When you’ve emailed someone and they reply and you reply and they reply you have established what’s known as a rapport. Regards now become redundant and should be avoided. Unless of course it’s part of your email signature in which case it’s redundant anyway. In extreme cases even “Hi” falls away and the emailing takes the form of a casual conversation. Sentences get sent back and forth with little or no punctuation. One word emails start to appear: “thanks” “ok” “excellent”. This is where you want to be. It’s the digital equivalent of having a drink with your colleagues and clients on a Friday afternoon. Everyone chills a bit and conversation becomes easier. Just like with Friday afternoon drinks though, you want to avoid using swear words and getting too personal. “What are you up to tonight?” and “That’s fucking great” are frowned upon.

It might sound like I regard myself to be at the cutting edge of social media — knocking back Diet Cokes with Mark Zuckerberg — but I assure you I am not. My phone can’t even receive an MMS. They just come through in a double SMS burst — the one telling me I can’t view the image and the next with a carefully thought out caption from whoever sent the MMS. I’m missing out on entire childhoods with only “Drinks a lot” and “Getting big now” to show for it. Just the other day an abbreviation on a major SA blog went straight over my head. What the hell does nsfw mean? I try to keep up to date with my abbreviations as much as the next guy but nsfw? Wtf? Not since friday wendy? Hey, what’s that? Not safe for work. OK, that explains it. It was pretty graphic come to think of it. Good thing it was only my five-year-old niece in the room and not my boss.