Cybergrievances - Guest Post from Absolutgator

My kids, who are in elementary school, have teacher assistants that are parents of a couple of other kids in class. Their job, which they volunteer to do, is simply to help the teachers with special projects and to keep all the parents informed about things going on in the classroom/special events. On Wednesday, we received an e-mail notification that there was a case of head lice in my son’s class; no it wasn’t him. The e-mail had a Word document attached that came from the school nurse about how to check your kids and what to do if you found lice. Good job keeping parents informed, right?

Well not for one parent. To protect the assholishness identity of this person, I’ll call him Mr. Jobs. It appears that Mr. Jobs is not a fan of Windows-based computers and really is annoyed by the attachment:

I appreciate your e-mails, but can I ask... why would this come as an attachment? I'm not a MS Word user (it's one of the worst written programs ever), but I was able to open it in other programs (like Pages and Staroffice). There's NOTHING in that document that would require it to be in a word document. No special formatting, pictures, etc. This is a REALLY big pet peeve of mine.

1. For all the windows users, you are risking them getting a virus (I use a Mac, so that's not a concern of mine). Microsoft Office documents are the petri dish of the Internet.

2. You expect everyone to have a $200 word processing software just to read an e-mail.

3. It makes me have to open another application to read something that's just plain text anyway.

So... in the future, I'd like to ask that if you are going to send us e-mails that are simple plain text, that you send them as e-mails. Not word attachments. IF, you have a highly formatted document with pictures, your fonts, etc., then I suggest you export those as a PDF, which everyone can freely read.

Just as an example (and to help anyone out that got this e-mail and doesn't have the ability to open the latest word documents), here's how the e-mail should have been:

Mr. Jobs then goes on to take the text from the attachment and put it at the bottom of the e-mail.

This really got under my skin for a couple of reasons. First, he clicked Reply All. Did he really have to let it be known to everyone how unhappy he was that she forwarded what was sent to her? Second, she is a volunteer! She is not getting paid to help the teacher that this guy’s kid is taught by and shouldn’t catch flack from some coffeehouse Mac lover (what a pretentious ass!).

So, it got me thinking. With all the ways we communicate electronically today, what are your greatest annoyances? (If you missed it, mine is when people use Reply All when they really need reply to only one person.)

-AbsolutGator

UPDATE: The dumbass did it again! The teacher assistant forwarded an e-mail attachement from the principal this time. He replied all what it 'should have looked like' and said 'your welcome' at the end of his e-mail. This makes me think of an SNL skit..."This guy needs a beatin'!"