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How to annoy your
colleagues using email
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Are you fed up with people wasting your time and causing
you unnecessary hassle?
Has your boss passed on so much work, you just don’t
know where to start?
Would you like to get your own back on the whole lot of
them?
If so, this guide is here to help you. Follow these instructions
carefully and you are guaranteed to really irritate thousands of
people, waste countless hours of their time and clog up the
university’s networks and mail servers at the same time.
This document and other Information Services documents are
held online on our website: https://staff.brighton.ac.uk/is
Last updated
By Jill Shacklock
July 2010
University of Brighton Information Services
Contents
Always send messages to as many people as possible .......................................... 3
Don’t make it clear who the message is for ............................................................. 3
Don’t bother filling in the subject line ....................................................................... 3
Make your message as long as possible ................................................................. 3
Include lots of unrelated questions and demands in the same message ................. 3
Include unrelated questions in replies to emails ...................................................... 4
Don’t include all the essential information ............................................................... 4
Send large enclosures/attachments ........................................................................ 4
Use read receipts on all your messages ................................................................. 4
Keep those Uni Info messages coming ................................................................... 4
Use plenty of humour and sarcasm ......................................................................... 5
Don’t check your message before sending it ........................................................... 5
Use email to vent your anger .................................................................................. 5
Annoy those techy types in the computer room ....................................................... 5
Has this document really annoyed you? .................................................................. 6
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How to annoy your colleagues using email
Always send messages to as many people as
possible
Think how many people need to know about the subject (possibly one), double that
number, take away the number of people likely to be interested (zero) and multiply
the result by 1000. Over 2000 people receive Uni Info messages, so that should do
the trick! There’s plenty of opportunity to irritate with Uni Info. I’d suggest you start
your message with ‘Apologies for using Uni Info for this’. Then they’ll know that you
know you’re wasting their time .. but you just don’t care, in fact, you relish it! Talking of relish, Uni info is great for telling everybody you’re closing the office and
going down the pub for the afternoon – guaranteed to make everybody feel bad and
hate you – they’ve got to work and you haven’t, yah boo sucks!
Don’t make it clear who the message is for
Email messages allow you to say who the message is for (in the To: field) and who
you are just sending it to for information only (those in the Cc: field). Don’t bother
using the Cc field, it’s for softies. Put everyone in the To: field then nobody will be
sure who is supposed to be acting on it and the chances are nobody will bother.
This will give you more things to complain about in a future message.
Don’t bother filling in the subject line
If you do feel the urge, make sure it is meaningless and has nothing to do with the
content of your message. No one will know where to file it for future reference and it
will be much harder for them to find it again.
Make your message as long as possible
Your colleagues have got loads of work to do and reading emails can be really time
consuming. They’d much prefer to have messages that are short and to the point,
so don’t give them that satisfaction. If you have lots of complicated information to
pass on, put it all in one message and send it to the whole university. Whatever you
do, don’t send short messages telling people where they can find the more detailed
information!
Include lots of unrelated questions and demands in
the same message
This is very effective – your colleagues won’t know which question to answer first.
They’ll probably get boggle-eyed, bogged-off and leave it all for later. Wait about six
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months and demand to know why it has taken them so long to answer your
question – the really important one that came at the end of the list that they didn’t
quite get to. Of course they won’t be able to find it. …. Ha, got them!
Include unrelated questions in replies to emails
If someone sends you a message about course validation, why not send them a
reply asking them to check your spreadsheet on expenditure for this month and also
to let you know the train times from Moulsecoomb to Eastbourne? Pretty soon
you’ll have two or three conversations going with the same subject line and it will be
impossible to keep a track on those separate threads. Great stuff! It is very easy to
change the subject line if you want to start a new conversation, but why bother?
Don’t include all the essential information
If you leave some key information out of your message, the recipient will have to
engage in a prolonged exchange of emails before they can even begin to deal with
your message. Try to make them wait a while before replying. They’ll soon lose the
plot and not be able to remember where they are with this enquiry.
Send large enclosures/attachments
Include at least three documents (photos and movies are even better) with your
message. Oh, and don’t tell what’s in any of the files. Then your colleagues have to
open them all to find out whether they’re relevant. The other advantage of sending
files is that people may feel obliged to keep them, not knowing whether they might
need them or not. If you’ve sent them to Uni Info, that’s loads of copies. Of course,
if the document was really useful to all those people you should put it on a server
and send people a link to it instead – but pah, where’s the fun in that?
Use read receipts on all your messages
This can have its drawbacks as you end up with twice as much stuff in your Inbox
(or 2000 times as much if you’re sending to Uni Info) … However it can be worth the
agro because every person that reads your message has to do at least three clicks:
one to open it, one to get rid of the annoying ‘this person has requested a read
receipt’ box and one to delete your message, which of course wasn’t that important
anyway. Love it!
Keep those Uni Info messages coming
Ask anyone what they like least about email and they’ll tell you it’s receiving so
many SPAM messages. If someone else steals your thunder and sends an irritating
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How to annoy your colleagues using email
message to Uni Info, make it much worse by sending another message to them
(copied to Uni Info) telling them they shouldn’t have done this. They will already
have received a message from HelpDesk advising them of their mistake, so you
can really rub it in and humiliate them more publicly. You know the sort of thing,
‘please don’t fill my Inbox with messages like this’ – Let them know this is your job,
fill theirs and another 2000 people’s inboxes with yet another irritating message.
Use plenty of humour and sarcasm
You can easily make your message irritating, patronising and adolescent … just
like this guide. It’s so difficult to judge a person’s real mood from an email message
and oh so easy to misinterpret what they are saying. You can end up causing even
more offence than you actually intended – Result! Just in case you were thinking of
it, avoid the wishy washy approach of adding smiley faces ; ) after every ‘joke’ you
put in. That gives your recipient a clue that you are trying to be light hearted – sort
of misses the point of deliberately trying to provoke and upset people, don’t you
think?
Don’t check your message before sending it
Ignore any available spell checkers, don’t make sure the tone is right, and don’t look
to see whether there is anything included likely to cause offence (there’s always a
danger you’ll turn soft and delete it). - You don’t want people to think you care, or
have made some sort of effort do you?
Use email to vent your anger
Make yourself feel better by passing on your gripes, resentment and irritations.
Complain to and about others as much as you can. Send your messages while you
are still really angry. Don’t wait until you’ve calmed down, your messages will seem
much more considered and rational by then and people may not find out what a
plonker you really are.
Annoy those techy types in the computer room
This can easily be achieved by filling up the mail servers, sending and keeping lots
of mail. That’ll keep them busy reorganising file store and struggling to keep the
networks working effectively. Keep as many messages as you can in your Inbox
(lots of enclosures), never clear out your Sent mail folder and follow all the other
suggestions above. Good sport.
With thanks to my own respected colleagues who contributed their suggestions and
inspiration in more ways than one!
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Has this document really annoyed you?
Would you have preferred some practical advice on how to manage your own Inbox
and how to make information available to others more efficiently? If so see these
more helpful documents from Information Services
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Email Blitz (PC) – tips for clearing up an unwieldy Outlook inbox
Email Blitz (Mac) – tips for clearing up an unwieldy Outlook inbox
A quick start guide to using staffmail with Exchange 2010
I'm not late am I? - Organizing your life with Outlook 2007
Alternatively, would you like more copies to annoy your colleagues? If so, send an
email to [email protected] (remember no helpful subject line and don’t tell us
how many you want, nor where to send them).
Better still, save a few trees and tell your colleagues to read these documents
online on staffcentral
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