I think one of the better cultural shifts, at least in the US, to come from the pandemic is the number of people wearing masks if they feel even slightly ill and have to go out in public. Better yet, a number of businesses seem to actually mean it when they tell employees to stay home if they’re sick, rather than perversly commending those who come into the workplace when they are quite obviously suffering and contagious.

Get vaccinated, wear a mask if you feel ill, you just want to, or you’ll be visiting someone at high risk indoors. That said, and I know I will lose most of you here, it doesn’t seem necessary for the general populace, when they’re not ill, to follow masking guidelines when in public. I’m not a medical professional, so I simply follow CDC guidelines. To my knowledge, there isn’t a mask recommendatiom for the general populace at this time.

Purplely anecdotal, but since our hospital system is no longer critically overburdened, and folks are mostly vaccinated, it has been my observation that the negative impact on people’s mental health, that the isolation of masking and social distancing induces, is a greater risk to the health of the general public than Covid and its variants. If you choose to take additional precautions, that is absolutely your perogative and you should feel empowered to do so. It’d be great if we could have it all, but people have to do what’s right for them to make it through another day.

Thanks for defending my right to say stupid things.

No, you. Thanks

Thinking about it, there may be something to this. Up until a few years ago, all my more work correspondence was incredibly sterile and formal. Not a single exclamation point in sight. Nowadays, my communication is much more cheerful. Perhaps because I’ve become desensitized to all the energy from those damn kids, whenever I run into an old-guard style communicator I interpret is as insincere.

This. It’s the presumption of a done/deal with no comment period. If it’s coming from C-Suite, then yeah, I’m their whipping boy unless they are telling me to do something extremely stupid in an area where I am the subject matter expert (then I just get it in writing that this is a terrible idea that I advised against and do it anyways because they own me). However, what I’m referring to are the individuals that have no grounds to assume they can issue me any sort of directive.

Yeah, my own fault for not including the proper details. If you’re interested, you might find some clarity in this response.

I don’t know that this will have any impact on your opinion, but here’s a reply that provides the context I should have included in my original post.

Yeah, it’s my own fault for not providing enough context. You are 100% on the ball that this is not regarding an email sign-off. Allow me to remedy the lack of appropriate context.

I’m the IT person at my org. The latest incident that sparked this post was a member of our sales team shooting me a message of, “Hey, send me a new pair of AirPods. Thanks.” There’s a couple of things wrong with approaching me that way:

1. Any request, especially hardware requests, need to be submitted as a ticket so that there’s a paper trail. It’s a well established procedure. If you scroll back in our message history, it is almost exclusively them attempting to bypass the ticketing system and me responding to the tune of, “Hey! Happy to help. Shoot me a ticket at https://link-to-our-ticket-system.com and I will assist you as soon as I can!”
2. Nearly anything that comes to my desk, that isn’t a technical issue, is a request that needs to be put through the review process, and approved or denied based upon its merit.

Interactions along that line aren’t unique, or tied to any specific individual. It’s typically a percentage of any employee pool I have ever been a part of. It’s the presumption of a done deal that grinds my gears, but I don’t have the perspective to guess at their thought process so I was curious if I was missing something. Anyways, thank you for your thoughtful response. It is greatly appreciated.

This is awesome.