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Comment by coredog64 | Hacker News Reader

True story: I sent a technically correct, succinct email to someone in another division. They complained up to their VP, who talked to my VP, and then the st rolled downhill on me.

Allegedly, the problem was that I hadn't apologized that they were having a bad experience with a service that we offer.

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I've also started questioning how I phrase my own work related e-mails.

Yesterday I was sent one from a partner saying that some files we were to transfer to their FTP server (yeah, I know it's 2017) were missing. So I logged into the server manually and checked -- the files were there, created at 5 AM, just like they are everyday when the cron job that generates them was run. So I started my response by saying, "I just checked the server manually and the files were there. Why do you consider them missing?"

But then I started to think...would this reply come off as if I were questioning their intelligence? They must believe that the files actually aren't there, or else they wouldn't have sent me an e-mail asking. The same process has been running everyday since February of last year, however, and presumably they had never failed to find the files before yesterday.

I just sent the e-mail anyway, but it is interesting that I've been conditioned to question myself over a very innocuous reply to make sure my tone was appropriate, as to not risk offending the other party.

> I just sent the e-mail anyway, but it is interesting that I've been conditioned to question myself over a very innocuous reply to make sure my tone was appropriate, as to not risk offending the other party.

That's a good habit to get into, particularly given how many of our usual non-verbal cues don't come across in email.

I often think to myself "I'm about to send a mail to X hundred/thousand people; it's worth my taking a couple extra moments or even minutes considering exactly how it might come across".

well in this case your reply IS very condescending. lmao. "I just checked the server manually and the files were there. Could you check again and let me know if they still aren't showing up for you?" would probably be a better way to phrase what you're saying.

Agreed on its own, but I would consider the personality sending it. A manager I worked with sent emails that sounded like Data trying to parse human communication and often seemed condescending, but in person, the guy was very affable. Turns out he is just a poor communicator through text. If I got the above message from a someone in another division, I would think he was being condescending on purpose.

Maybe I should also add that this partner has been a nightmare to work with for well over a year, so perhaps some of my annoyance with them in general is shining through. They have certainly talked down to me before in a very transparent way, when in fact they were the ones in the wrong, so I don't feel all that bad.

For example, there was a multiple day e-mail back-and-forth debating XML namespaces for SOAP requests on another related project. My code generated XML with different namespace labels than those in their examples, so they told me it was "incorrect". I had to send them the specific section of the SOAP spec to illustrate that the labels can be anything as long as they are set to the appropriate URI -- they're labels. They didn't believe me, thought that the differing namespace labels were what were causing the requests to be rejected on their end...until a few days later when it turned out that it was a completely unrelated bug in their system.

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