I Hate Your E-Mail Signature

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The age-old inquiry of “Where do you see yourself in five years,” almost strictly reserved for first-time interview and torrentially nagging parents, never has the same answer in the time span it begs to question. While you may have sucked up the nerve to answer positively, under the lines of “hopefully with X Corporation doing my due-diligence in the role I so desperately want,” that wasn’t the truth. No one straight out of college wanted to be married to their job; they were crossing off the boxes in their Page-A-Day’s until homecoming weekend to pay tribute to alma mater they were terrorizing not six months before.

But unless you’ve found a gig at a budding internet company that allows you to make lists of “The Best Instructional Recipes Videos” or “Fifteen Hilarious Caitlyn Jenner Insurance Claims” in an open-air office space that allows sweatpants and makes pan-fried noodles to order, chances are you’ve unintentionally eloped with your entry-level position. This means late nights in the office, a company Blackberry on blast when you just want to drink or sleep, and hopeless long days waiting for the next annual outing that’ll pay you to get drunk. This falls under the tired adage of “paying your dues,” but you quickly realize that little things get under your skins like splinters of unmeasurable infuriation.

One of the deepest splinters that conveniently places itself in the side of my ass every day is “Sent from my iPhone” signatures. I understand that they’re a default; they’re an indicator to the recipient that the message you’ve received was sent from a mobile device and by reasonable understanding, there may be typos and you should accept that. That is never the reason.

Hey Mr. Director,

Thank you again for taking the time to sit down with me on such short notice to go over the bullets from the meeting with Our Annoyingly Picky Client. Your insight on these points are exactly what I needed to finish up the final Steerco presentation and I will have a copy of that ready for you tomorrow.

Best,
G

It’s one of those e-mails that despite being just over sixty words, you re-read it about a dozen times to ensure that everything is tip-top and you send it from Outlook, just so spell-check can run through it once more. You click Send and get back to some other business, but the reply looms in your head until you clock out.

Maybe you’re on the train back home, or in a bar getting a burger and some well-deserved brew in your system, when a single buzz erupts from your pocket and you know exactly what it is. Tension builds in your chest and you hope you’re on the receiving end of some minor appreciation that’ll settle you down like a verbal Ambien for the night.

Np.
Sent via the Samsung Galaxy S™ II Skyrocket™, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone, running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

It seems silly to be so blisteringly angry at a response like that because it probably was “np” for them to sit down and go over things, like any superior would. They probably received the message late and shot a quick response back to acknowledge that they read it. But the signature, the signature almost 18x longer than the message itself, is catatonically infuriating. Thanks, to the 70-cent QA technician at Samsung that ensured that each and every provisioned phone had a default signature that represented a novel of useless information. Thank you, to the service provider who kept it in there for a quick stab at some cheap advertising. Fuck you, every other person who blatantly ignores its presence in every composed response done mid-shit in a public stall.

Sent from my BlackBerry: thank you for taking the time to trackball over to my message that delivered useful thought straight to your palms. Thank you RIM, for reminding the world that you’re still hanging onto a seemingly worthless market share you still have and simultaneously outing your users for being five years behind the scale of technological improvement.

Sent From my iPhone, [full business signature]: Gee, for a second I forgot where you worked. I completed forgot about the fact we’re the same company, sending mail internally through each other, only to be recapped on your early undeserved promotion because you hawk your Dad’s TPG membership to rub elbows with VP’s who wouldn’t tell you from guy who empties the wastebaskets at 7 p.m. if it weren’t for the company logo scrawled on your sweat-wicking polo and the constant repetition of your full name in your fucking e-mails.

Multiple lines of
communication and yet
no thought expressed
~ ~
Jane Seymour
Kitty-Kat, Motorboat Inc.
W: xxx-xxx-xxxx ~ M: [10 digits of desperation]

It changes almost every week, another 9-word glob of dismal poetry, all because you bought a $2.99 Kindle book with a chapter with Bashō excerpts.

If this isn’t a tiny corner of Hell I forgot I entered, then it’ll be a breeze when the time actually comes. .

Image via Shutterstock

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