. . .

Hands down, one of the worst things I can encounter in email is the overuse of the ellipsis. An example:

I’ve checked with our accountants and my paycheck hasn’t been sent to them yet . . . can you get in touch with whoever you need to to sort this out . . . it’s been weeks and I still haven’t been paid . . . I know you’re on top of this, sorry to be a bother . . . get back to me when you know where it is.

What’s worse is that the people that overuse the ellipsis don’t do it every once in awhile, they do it constantly. So every email from them is torture because they refuse to adhere to the conventions of normal punctuation. Each email makes them seem like a slow-thinking dullard who is pretentious enough to associate the ellipsis with being well-written, and therefore they come off like a total fucking prat every time they rattle off another missive.

Then there’s the guy that constantly puts smiley faces at the ends of his emails. That’s right, I said HIS emails (although I would venture to say that this is more often than not something that occurs more with females than males, but my personal plight is with a straight (!) male). Somehow, the inclusion of or at the end of each and EVERY email I get from this person makes me feel like they’re not taking me seriously. So each email I send, no matter how great the importance or work-related the contents are, I get back a response that makes it sound like I asked to go to the fair this weekend, and my daddy told me “Sure, sweetheart. You can go to the fair. ” Gosh, now I’m creeped out by my dad. This has sparked some kind of weird Electra complex reaction. Is it not clear, then, that the emoticons create nothing but spite and sexual confusion?