Annoy me!

RantWoman has a full and rich life. She is abundantly grateful for much of this life. Today though RantWoman's life, more particularly her email is far overly endowed with annoyances, annoyances that are supposed to cheer and inform! RantWoman is talking about all the GUNK that people put at the bottom of their email. Consider the following categories:

--The confidentiality / limitation of practice boilerplate. RantWoman KNOWS these texts are there for the protection of the sender and the information contained. RantWoman always finds it just a little disconcerting though to get email distributed through an email listserve where the confidentiality boilerplate is three times as long as the rest of the content of the message. Often this mail is from language professionals working in legal or medical fields. RantWoman knows perfectly well that these domains are awash in confidentiality concerns. She just tries to reconcile the confidentiality points with appearance on public listserves, especially when the boilerplate gets repeated with each new reply to the thread. Next RantWoman marvels that language professionals who are supposed to specialize in correct and clear communications cannot seem to boil their boilerplate down from the dimensions of War and Peace to at most a couple sentences.

--The inspiring quotationS. RantWoman is all for short bursts of inspiring prose. RantWoman herself regularly needs fresh inspiration and insight. RantWoman absolutely categorically does not need more than ONE burst of inspiration with each mail message. RantWoman has one correspondent who has used the same THREE items for several weeks. RantWoman alas does not quite feel she knows this correspondent well enough to ask him please to ease up on the inspiration or at least to rotate so we all get new bursts from time to time.

--Animated emoticons! RantWoman has one correspondent who uses these leering yellow menaces on her professional business correspondence. The first problem is the leering yellow menace effect with grinning buck teeth and cheeringstick arms. The second problem is that the leering yellow menaces do not hold up well as they are passed back and forth among different email systems. What start out as leering yellow menaces come back the second time around as meaningless strings of numbers above as well as below the message text. RantWoman's screen reader takes even longer to get to the content text and RantWoman's brain has even longer to go on holiday, to space out and to miss the critical content. RantWoman wants to thank this coworker: RantWoman THINKS the animated emoticons have finally been excised and she categorically absolutely hopes they do not come back.

Compared to world hunger, lack of potable water, and other assaults on human dignity, RantWoman knows perfectly well she is supposed to count her blessings that the worst problem of her day is leering yellow menaces in her email. RantWoman freely admits she is thoroughly spoiled by the mollycoddled cushiness of modern life and not the least bit apologetic about the possibility that the leering yellow menaces might push her fragile psyche over the edge!