I Put It in Writing. You Put Your Own Spin on It. 😵‍💫

You know that feeling when you sit down to write an email and actually put some thought into it? I mean real thought. You organize your thoughts, explain the situation, include the important details, provide context, and maybe even reread the whole thing three times because you want to make absolutely certain the person on the other end cannot possibly misunderstand what you're saying. You carefully choose your words, make sure the information is in the right order, and perhaps even add a little background information because you know that without it, your question might not make sense. Eventually, you hit send and sit back feeling pretty good about yourself. “Okay,” you think. “That was clear. There is absolutely no way this could be misunderstood.”

And then the response arrives.

You open it, read it once, and immediately get that strange feeling in your stomach. You read it again because surely you must have missed something. Then you go back and reread your original email because maybe you weren't as clear as you thought you were. You check the recipient. Yep, right person. You check the subject line. Yep, right conversation. You scroll through your original message and start comparing the two emails like you're working on a forensic investigation. Then it hits you: they didn't actually read your email. They skimmed it. They saw a few words, formed an assumption about what you were talking about, and responded with complete confidence to a question you never actually asked.

There is something almost magical about receiving a response to an email that doesn't seem to have any connection to the email you actually sent. You can write three perfectly organized paragraphs explaining that you're trying to determine whether something needs to be updated, why you're asking, what information you've already reviewed, and what specifically you need clarified. You might even provide examples because you're trying to make the whole thing as easy as possible. Then the response comes back with something like, “Sounds good. We'll update the file.” You stare at the screen for a moment. The file? What file? I didn't ask you to update a file. Nobody mentioned a file. Where did the file come from? Did the file arrive in the room while I was typing?

I think some people read emails the way I read restaurant menus when I'm starving. They scan the page quickly, look for something familiar, skip over anything that requires too much thought, and then make a decision based on approximately 11% of the available information. The problem is that this method works reasonably well when you're deciding between a cheeseburger and chicken strips. It doesn't work quite as well when someone is trying to explain a complicated situation involving several different pieces of information. Unfortunately, there are people who apparently believe that if they recognize three words in an email, they have successfully absorbed the entire message.

And you can usually tell when it happened. You spend twenty minutes writing an email that contains context, details, examples, dates, and an actual question, and they respond approximately seven seconds after you send it. Seven seconds. Unless they have developed the ability to read at the speed of light, there is no possible way they processed what you wrote. They didn't read it. They glanced at it, spotted one word that looked familiar, and their brain immediately said, “Yep, I know what this is about.” And off they went, confidently answering a question that exists entirely inside their own imagination.

The really fun part comes when you have to respond to their response. Now you have to politely explain that what they just answered wasn't actually what you were asking. You don't want to sound irritated, so you start typing something very professional like, “Just to clarify…” Those two words are doing a tremendous amount of work. “Just to clarify” is professional email language for “Please go back and read the email I just sent you because apparently we are having two completely different conversations.” You explain the question again, provide the relevant information again, and sometimes you even copy and paste the exact sentence from your original email that contained the question. At that point, you have essentially become a tour guide leading someone through an email they have already received.

Eventually you reach the point where you write the phrase, “Per my original email below.” Oh, that phrase. “Per my original email below” is one of the great passive-aggressive masterpieces of professional communication. It sounds perfectly polite. Completely innocent. Very businesslike. But everyone knows what it really means. It means, “I already told you this. It was literally in the email you apparently did not read. Please scroll down approximately six inches and look at the words I already wrote.” You can dress it up however you want, but the message is still sitting there underneath the professional wording, wearing a tiny business suit and tapping its watch.

What makes it even more frustrating is that sometimes your original email wasn't confusing at all. You can understand someone missing something when the situation is complicated or when you didn't explain something clearly. That's normal. We're all human. But there is a special kind of frustration that comes from knowing you deliberately took the time to make something clear and the other person simply didn't bother to slow down long enough to actually read it. You weren't asking them to decode the Rosetta Stone. You were asking them to read an email. An email they apparently treated like the terms and conditions on a website: scroll, skim, accept, move on.

At that point, you start considering other forms of communication. Maybe a phone call would be easier. Maybe you should send a text. Maybe you should create a flowchart. Perhaps a PowerPoint presentation would help. You could even make a colorful diagram with arrows pointing from one sentence to the next. “THIS is what I said. THIS is what I asked. THIS is the information you responded to. Notice how these are not the same thing.” Honestly, at some point, you're not sure whether you're communicating with another adult or preparing a presentation for kindergarten.

And then you remember that calling someone means you actually have to talk to them, so suddenly the email doesn't seem quite so bad after all.

I think we've all been on both sides of this at some point. We are busy, we're distracted, we're answering emails between other tasks, and sometimes our brains just don't cooperate. But there is something uniquely funny about putting serious effort into a carefully written email only to receive a response that makes you wonder if the person read it while standing in line at the grocery store, riding an escalator, and simultaneously trying to remember why they walked into the room.

So the next time you spend twenty minutes carefully composing an email, rereading it, checking your wording, adding context, and making sure your question is crystal clear, only to receive a response that has absolutely nothing to do with what you wrote, take comfort in knowing that you are not alone. Somewhere out there, someone is currently responding to an email they have read approximately 14% of, and they are probably feeling very confident about their answer. Meanwhile, you're sitting at your desk staring at their response, rereading your original email for the fourth time and thinking, “Well, that's certainly an answer. It just isn't an answer to anything I said.”

And that, my friends, is the magical world of email communication.