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An e-mail’s style says much about the sender

I’ve learned that there are two types of people in the office — highly important and regular. You can’t immediately tell which camp a colleague belongs to simply by looking at him, nor is it obvious from the size of her cubicle or office.

So how do you determine who’s highly important and who is regular? You will know them by their e-mail.

The highly important make sure that every e-mail they send is marked highly important. Sometimes the e-mail even comes with those waving flames; it will always land in your in-box with a return receipt.

The contents of these highly important e-mails usually range from “I’ll be in at 10 because I need to bring Poochems to the vet for his worms,” to “team lunch at Bennigan’s,” to “who stole my yogurt from the refrigerator?” Needless to say, the highly important return receipt e-mailers always include a cc: list that appears longer than the entire company directory.

I used to laugh at the messages from the highly important because they were usually sent by a person whose status on the company’s organizational chart was conversely proportionate to the e-mail’s placement in my in box. That was until I discovered that my new boss was in fact a highly important, while I proudly remain a regular. It wasn’t long after his arrival that we were hit by a departmentwide highly important e-mail epidemic.

One day, after receiving 36 highly important e-mails from my boss and another 17 from my teammates, I decided to conduct some unscientific research. My results showed there are eight distinct traits of the highly important. The first three, as cited above, are the use of highly important status, usually accompanied by a graphic symbol underscoring the importance of the message, and always sent with a return receipt.

Unfortunately, the regulars are to blame for the fourth characteristic — abuse of capital letters. You see, if we had only forwarded all of those articles chastising the highly important for the ABUSE of CAPITAL LETTERS in electronic correspondence via the highly important delivery mechanism, then that problem would have resolved itself.

This brings me to my fifth characteristic: The highly important don’t read e-mail stamped regular.

The sixth trait is the overabundance of exclamation points, question marks, and those cute little pictures known as emoticons. For those not in the know, emoticons have replaced the use of the colon and the closed parenthesis to create a smiley face :). Without the emoticon, you may not otherwise know how to decipher the meaning of the e-mail from the words contained in the message.

Before you can close a highly important e-mail, you should take careful note of the signature, as this constitutes trait number seven. For the highly important, the signature at the bottom of the e-mail includes their first, middle, and last name along with their title, work address, office telephone number, home office number, fax, cellphone number, and instant messenger handle. My boss’s signature makes such ample use of mixing colors and font sizes that it almost dwarfs the actual contents in the e-mail. And no matter how many times I’ve read those highly important e-mails from my boss, I can’t help but get distracted by the moving picture of the golfer swinging on the green that’s located just below his signature.

And the last trait that signifies a highly important is the pithy saying that can be found below the signature, otherwise known as a siglet. Sometimes, the highly important will attribute Confucius, Socrates, or Homer Simpson as the thought originator. However, after my thorough analysis, I’ve learned not to bank on proper attribution. In my boss’s case, the siglet is located between his signature and the golfer and imparts the drop-everything-and-think statement, “If it’s not breathing, it doesn’t matter.”

Once you’ve become accustomed to the barrage of highly important e-mail, you learn to ignore those eight characteristics. With enough conditioning, you don’t really see your in-box as it is. “I’ll be in at 10 BECAUSE I need to bring POOCHEMS to the VET for his worms!!” “TEAM lunch at BENNIGAN’S!!!!” and “who STOLE my YOGURT from the REFRIGERATOR?????”

After completing my research project, I decided it was time to turn the e-mail tide and serve as a regular example for my colleagues and my boss. It was my mission to convert the highly important to regular e-mail. Or at least curb the abuse. So I responded to all of the highly important e-mails via regular delivery. I chimed in on those group notes with “That’s a DOGGONE shame!!” “Should I wear flair???” and “Not me, I’m lactose intolerant.”

Though for the sake of my research, I will confess I took a page from the highly importants and sent those regular e-mails with return receipts. That’s how I learned about characteristic number five — the lack of return receipts showed the highly important weren’t even bothering to read my regular old responses to their ever-so-critical posts.

Still, I haven’t completely given up hope on my stop-the-e-mail-abuse campaign. I think the next highly important e-mail I receive should be met with a proper response. Maybe I’ll just pick up the phone.