Ending the charm offensive

Today I realised just how much effort I put into writing charming professional emails.

I start always with a sweet salutation, then elucidate some carefully expressed sentiment framed just the right way so as not to offend or leave room for confusion, and finish by telling the correspondent how much I'm looking forward to hearing from them.

For fifteen years I've been composing—really, composing is the most accurate verb here—these missives to people who:

• reply with "Thanx"
• don't bother to respond at all
• are incapable of using salutations of any type
• ignore my email then write to me a week later to ask what's going on
• read the email, ignore what I've communicated, and reply with three short sentences that tell me what they're going to do regardless, apparently, of the input of myself as their colleague
• reply with questions relating exclusively to something else entirely.

So why bother?

This is the question of the day. The only answer I can come up with is, "because I'm an idiot." Well, idiocy no more. From this day forth, I will give precisely on a par with what I get.

And so ends the charm offensive.