Work stuff.
First: Give me the bad news, god-dammit!
I'm not that scary, am I? I know that it's hard to give bad news, like "We're really sorry, but we screwed up your book and now it's going to be very late and we're really sorry - no, sorrier than that...".
But when I've sent you five totally unanswered emails, and you've dodged three phone calls, I'm likely to get much more annoyed than I would have been if you'd just told me so in the first place. Sigh.
Second: So precious.
Our MD has been mucking around with public email folders and has - as an experiment - put up a folder called the Idiot folder, containing some of the crazier requests that we've received over the years, for fun and reference.
I think my favourite so far is:
"Hi. I'm doing a school project and I'd like to know if you could tell me if the quote 'I think the lady protest too much' (or something like that) is from Shakespear. If not, do you know who it is and where it's from? Thanks."
10/10 for panache, kid. But surely the effort it took to find that we published a facsimile edition of some of Shakspeare's plays was far greater than actually finding the quote itself?
I'm not that scary, am I? I know that it's hard to give bad news, like "We're really sorry, but we screwed up your book and now it's going to be very late and we're really sorry - no, sorrier than that...".
But when I've sent you five totally unanswered emails, and you've dodged three phone calls, I'm likely to get much more annoyed than I would have been if you'd just told me so in the first place. Sigh.
Second: So precious.
Our MD has been mucking around with public email folders and has - as an experiment - put up a folder called the Idiot folder, containing some of the crazier requests that we've received over the years, for fun and reference.
I think my favourite so far is:
"Hi. I'm doing a school project and I'd like to know if you could tell me if the quote 'I think the lady protest too much' (or something like that) is from Shakespear. If not, do you know who it is and where it's from? Thanks."
10/10 for panache, kid. But surely the effort it took to find that we published a facsimile edition of some of Shakspeare's plays was far greater than actually finding the quote itself?