I hope you can find a happy to help off set the sad, Rebecca.

Oh my god, I have an author getting seriously shitty with me about a deadline. When we send them their edited manuscript to review, we request that it be returned within 2 days, and put that date in the subject line. [Note: I did not come up with that format; I am a cog in the giant machine that is the AMA.]

When the authors inevitably ignore the deadline, we follow up, and remind them of the date the manuscript was due back.

This author who I followed up with today shot back with "I have reviewed the email that you sent and there is no date mentioned. Do NOT [all caps hers] make unsubstantiated claims while insinuating that I am delinquent."

So I emailed back and said "The return date is in the subject line of the email you received on January 15." The phrase "YOU JACKHOLE" was not included, but heavily implied.

How do they do that, Lee?

This author who I followed up with today shot back with "I have reviewed the email that you sent and there is no date mentioned. Do NOT [all caps hers] make unsubstantiated claims while insinuating that I am delinquent."

OH MY GOD. I love how she's got plenty of time to parse the details of the email, but not enough time to actually do the review or to notice the subject line.

I love how she's got plenty of time to parse the details of the email, but not enough time to actually do the review or to notice the subject line.

She just replied with "I offer the suggestion of also putting it in the email since the subject is so long that it is truncated by Outlook unless I pop the email out, especially if you expect compliance."

Now, I totally grant her point that the subject line can get long because of all the stuff that the template puts in the subject line, so maybe adding it in the body of the email is a good thing, and I'll mention that to the freelance coordinator, who can pass the suggestion up the chain (or shoot it down).

But it's the "especially if you expect compliance" that KILLS me. Should I NOT expect compliance? Is that a crazy wacky thing in publishing?

I would have been 100% fine with her reply if she had left that shitty, bitchy snark off the end. Fuck you, lady. Your article was both boring AND poorly written.

Obviously, she did not expect you to expect compliance.

We are all the time trying to train people (coworkers, that is) to put important information in the subject line so we don't have to open emails that don't pertain to us (my company has a culture of replying-all all the time, and spamming a whole department rather than finding out which individual you need to contact, I get a ton of mail that I can just ignore if I know what it's about). Repeating it in the body of the email is a pretty good practice, though. Not that you get to decide that, I understand, Tep. Annoying all the way around.

My mom had the bone density thing done, but I forget what the procedure was like (if she told me. I know she told me that the doctor told her her bone density was low and was therefore decreasing and she countered that probably it had always been low, they'd never checked it before, but I don't know any other details)

I have done nothing today except feed myself and read mysteries. I have been a Very Hungry Caterpillar all day, for some reason.

Ugh, Steph. The eternal battle to get educated professionals to actually read the entire goddam email.

And to find exactly the right balance between not enough information in the subject line, and writing the entire email in the subject line. Everyone wants something different.

OK, got all my cutting boards washed and bleached some grout. Not as dramatic an improvement as I hoped for, that second one. Oh well.

I'm getting dangerously close to the point where I have to think about where I want things to be stored rather than just stashing them wherever there happens to be room right now. That's going to slow things down considerably.

How do they do that, Lee?

It's sort of a cross between an x-ray and a cat scan. You don't have to be inside the tube, since they were only checking my spine and hips and the imaging device can be focused there, but they made me lie down and strapped my feet down so I couldn't move them out of pigeon toed position.

I've been idly searching for indoor planters for succulents, and I think I must own Totoro and Catbus: [link]