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How do you respond to a one-character email from your boss's boss's boss? (2018)
- willcipriano 4y agoReply with a exclamation mark, that's shorthand that you are alarmed.
- imwillofficial 4y agoHahahahahah like metal gear solid!
- klyrs 4y ago^ (single raised eyebrow)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- memco 4y agoK
- thrown_22 4y ago>? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- sokoloff 4y agoWhile I greatly dislike the “if I act excessively squeaky, I will get some grease”, I have to say this is remarkably effective process within companies. I just wish there was a way to better calibrate the company response to balance the 99.75% of customers who don’t write to the CEO with the tiny fraction who do.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- roflyear 4y agoI once had an issue for a client and managed to get in touch with the CEO of HP's exec assistant. The issue was resolved literally next day after weeks of HP being unhelpful through usual channels. This often works with government too, especially local government. Call your state reps and your town government officials if you need to. It is why they are there.
- ivraatiems 4y agoIt's very common for companies to have an "executive support" organization entirely dedicated to dealing with customers who complain to executives. They often have power to do things and move pieces within different parts of the company in ways that nobody else does. I had this experience with Charter Spectrum. Among other things, they kept threatening to send me to collections for not returning equipment which I was actively using to obtain their services, which I was paying for. I looked up the email addresses of a few executives in relevant departments and sent them an email explaining everything. I got a call from an "executive support agent" (or some similar title) the next day. It still took a couple weeks to resolve the problem, but it did get resolved, and they locked me in at a lower rate. Sad that it's necessary, but hey, if it works, it works. Just be polite and ask for what you need.
- avidiax 4y agoJust did the same thing with Comcast. They let the future renter of my address take over the address and cancel my service a month in advance. Complained to the FCC and got a call from the executive customer service a couple of days later. Still took multiple hours to resolve, but it was at least done right, not barely patched until I have to spend 2 hours on the phone again for the next incomplete patch.
- Havoc 4y agoI find the claim that bezos sees “most of those emails” quite hard to believe. Must be thousands of them
- pas 4y agohow many people know the address though?
- sokoloff 4y agoAs the sometimes recipient of these complaints, it seems that customers go looking for any somewhat high-level person with a published email address.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- moltar 4y agoTons of sellers know it for sure. It was a common tactic to email jeff@ with any seller problems with a hope of getting them addressed quickly.
- beloch 4y agoYou've heard of the "royal we"? This is the "executive I". Where the potentate uses the former to lend the weight of the many to their words, the executive uses the latter to take personal credit for the work of many and thereby justify the weightiness of their own salary.
- 4y ago
- earthboundkid 4y agof
- memorable 4y ago?
- aussieshibe 4y agoI suspect this is a reference to the "press f to pay respects" meme. I read it as a jocular expression of sympathy for the Amazon employees, playing on the single character point.
- pas 4y agoIf it's common it cannot rally be a big deal. Also drop everything to investigate? Sure why not, if you are at Amazon and you don't mind the culture at least you are probably getting paid for your conformity. But in the end it's 100% just a gimmick, the machine marches on, even if there are structural/process changes resulting from these emails overall they doesn't have much to show for it since 2018. And if it's just a support channel, then Jeff could just look at a random sample of the support tickets and not fuck up the sprints of various teams...
- cs137 4y ago
- mustyouremember 4y ago"Sprint" is an agile buzzword, it does not imply speed or urgency. A "sprint" is a unit of time which defines the frequency of meetings where teams re-evaluate their immediate priorities. Usually somewhere in the fortnite-month range.
- kcplate 4y agoPretty sure we all understand that on here, and I second the comment above yours.
- aarghh 4y agoI'd be tempted to respond with "Use your words, Jeff". But then I am a mere minion.
- cs137 4y agoUnfortunately, people like us who respond to that sort of thing like a normal human (as opposed to a brainwashed corporate drone who lives in terror of the master's displeasure) tend not to do well in the corporate world. The trick of corporate survival, as observed in those who can actually hack it, is extreme compartmentalization. They become two people: one who watches the abuse from a distance as if it were happening to someone else, and then a normal self that is functional enough to do the grocery shopping without bursting into tears. The problem is that very few people can sustain this compartmentalization (also known as: dissociation) for more than a few years. It tends to play out badly (memory issues, alexithymia, autoimmunity) in the long term.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoYeah but how cool would you feel at parties being able to tell people "I once got fired for telling Jeff Bezos to go fuck himself" ?
- firecall 4y agoLike I said to my therapist last week; they hire you for your skill and creativity, then want you to sit in a box and do as you are told. Or somehow magically know what to do and say. If you say to little, you are not engaging with the team, say too much and you are disruptive. Say the wrong thing and thats a big problem. We really need to move our society on from telling people that companies are a family and they look after people. They dont.
- dannyw 4y agoYou need to work for a different company, this isn't normal.
- thrown_22 4y agoYes, this is called being professional. The idea that acting in a predictable and consistent manner is some form of abuse is bizarre. To put it in engineering terms: I don't care about the amazingly rich data structure manipulations you're doing internally, I want the json api endpoint to have the same spec as it did yesterday.
- cs137 4y ago
- sacrosancty 4y agoThey probably want the money and reputation that Amazon gives them. They have that to lose. What you're saying could be applied to anything people do for their own interest. Taken to the extreme - Afraid of starving? Should have just died instead, then you wouldn't need to depend on food.
- agiacalone 4y agoThat’s a pretty steep slippery-slope there.
- sacrosancty 4y agoLooking at the extreme implications of an argument can help nut out what somebody really thinks or what's really a good idea. Where do you draw the line? If social welfare is available, nobody's job matters? People often make ridiculous arguments like the GP's without realizing that the same argument also leads to extreme conclusions, so it's probably not really an honest justification for their belief.
- dahfizz 4y agoSo true. In communism, nobody would have power over you and you would never have to fear your superior. History has shown this to be true. /s
- Rebelgecko 4y agoI think some aversion to certain social situations is part of the core human condition, not to be blamed on any particular socioeconomic system. I imagine that if email had existed in their times, a similar one from Thayendanegea, William The Conqueror, Jesus Christ, or Karl Marx himself would lead to similar consternation.
- thrown_22 4y ago
- bqmjjx0kac 4y ago> Bezos forwarded it to your boss, with only a single character added: "?." As an armchair typographer, I think we need to stop insisting on placing sentence-terminating periods inside quotation marks. It would have been clearer this way. > Bezos forwarded it to your boss, with only a single character added: "?".
- bobbylarrybobby 4y agoIt doesn't even make sense. The sentence containing the quotation only ends when the quotation itself ends, not before. `print("abc)"`
- junofan 4y agoIt’s a tradition from the fixed-width font typewriter era IIRC. Quote mark followed by period looked bad because of all the whitespace.
- jle17 4y agoI wish we would do away with those nonsense traditions. I tend to ignore them but some correction softwares don't like it. Especially since they are incoherent between languages with no good reasons. English wants the dot in the quotes, French wants a space before colons, yada yada
- Kaze404 4y agoIs it? I've only ever seen this phenomenon in English text, and it's definitely not a thing in Portuguese.
- asplake 4y agoIn the US (and Canada?). British English puts commas and periods (full stops) outside the quotation marks unless the quotation is also a complete sentence or the punctuation is part of the quotation. Source: https://www.unr.edu/writing-speaking-center/student-resources/writing-speaking-resources/british-american-english https://www.unr.edu/writing-speaking-center/student-resource...
- krnlpnc 4y ago?
- dsr_ 4y ago.
- evan_ 4y agoAllegedly Victor Hugo sent a telegram, which at the time charged by the letter, to his literary agent shortly after the publication of Les Misérables to inquire of its sales: ? The agent responded: !
- bombcar 4y agoSupposedly the story goes that in 1843, after annexing the Indian province of Sind, British General Sir Charles Napier sent home a one word telegram, "Peccavi" implying "I have Sind." Although apocryphal, it's still a great story.
- smugma 4y agoApparently a 16 year old made up the joke and it was published in Punch in 1844. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peccavi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peccavi For those who don’t get it, peccavi is Latin for “I have sinned” and it’s a pun as Napier conquered/captured the Indian province Sindh.
- denton-scratch 4y agoNoScript blocked 19 of 22 scripts.