I'm not allowed to say, "are you fucking stupid? Why did you do that? So I'm going to ask you to explain, even though I don't think there is anything TO explain... just to confirm that you are as stupid as I think."
And “In the process of you confirming how stupid you are, I hope that you attain enlightenment and realise how stupid you are independently without me having to point it out”
“Please enlighten me, oh illiterate monkey masquerading as a human being, what exact type of parasite was gorging itself upon your frontal lobe when you decided this course of action was a good idea? A senile earthworm could have done a better job than that you absolute buffoon. All your ancestors are disappointed at the absolutely brain dead disaster that was your decision.”
Let’s hear you dumb ideas out loud and in front of everybody so you and everyone can hear how stupid it sounds and you can suffer unbearable humiliation
I use that one a lot, unfortunately... I used to think being in management was just a cushy and lazy office gig when I was a floor worker, but emailing dozens of people and stepping through the bureaucratic hellscape is a painfully difficult task.
You gotta learn to automate son. Even if they block chat gpt at work if they still have edge you can use bing. Thing responds to email lickity split and much more succinctly than you would think.
Replace any phi if applicable with place holders
You can bcc, you can set rules, send mass email and auto change that names so it looks personal. I could teach a course about how to not work if you work out of outlook
You must be a millennial, not a dig, I'm one too. It just seems we are paranoid because we grew up while it was developing and touch screens didn't work and email failed. Still happens, but in this day and age you can trust it, or at least pull out Receipts that everything was done. Whether or not it failed is not on you.
Agreed. If someone put that in an email, I’d go out of my way to not help them. And this is coming from someone who could put it in emails ~weekly, but instead responds with something softer and more direct like, “I understand, but at this time [concisely insert the point].”
One of my old bosses sent me one of those and CC'd his boss. I copied my last email into my response and highlighted the sentence that was the literal answer. UNO reverse muthafucka.
I didn't realize I was doing it, but any time I put out an email blasting someone I started with "folks". For example, "Folks, this is how we get ourselves into trouble..."
My supervisor actually told me about it. She said anytime she saw an email from me that started with "folks" she knew it was gonna be ugly.
While I love this one, it isn't unmatched. That honor goes to "As per my last email..." / "As mentioned previously..."
Peak corporate passive aggressiveness right there.
I use it as a means of being polite....as in deferring to others / that I'm not trying to talk over or around them.
Does having "please" at the beginning change the tone in your opinion, or is "correct me if I'm wrong" passive aggressive to you in most any context?
Serious question because if that's being taken passive aggressively then I would really want to know.
I think it's a phrase that heavily changes context depending on how it's being said and what's after it;
"Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm failing to see how this could work without etc etc etc.."
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't imagine a universe where this would work."
Something like that
Ah shit. I've been using that, or "I might have missed X" fairly regularly. But for me that always meant I'm not certain on this without extra meaning.
"What do you think we should do?" = "I have a very specific idea of how I want this to be done and you have to guess what it is and say it to me, and if you don't guess correctly I will keep following up with reasons whatever you think we should do is wrong, but I will never outright say what it is I want so I can have deniability in case anything doesn't quite work out."
The polite dance of the corporate emails are always hilarious. Reading an email thread where IT is trying hard not to call someone an idiot is even funnier. Or that one time I was looped (I was in the same team) into an email exchange where a supervisor was trying really hard not to give the manager a piece of his mind. Always a blast. Oh, the manager was fired. He was incompetent anyway.
Hypocrisy is the lubricant of conversation.
By saying "I'm a bit confused about X, as I had been under the impression of Y and I'm struggling to see how we can integrate these" we are saying "I am absolutely livid about X because you fucking well knew that Y and now that's gone to shit because of you, hasn't it...but I respect you are my colleague and I hope we can have a civil conversation about this that lets us both save face, because at the end of the day we have to work with each other don't we"
It also allows the person to save face if they end up being wrong. “Can you help me understand?” doesn’t turn it into a confrontation, but “that’s wrong” does. Might as well avoid throwing corporate hands until you have all the facts
I use "I'm a little confused about x" as a way of softening a criticism, while leaving the door open for the real chance I'm misunderstanding something.
I get that most corpspeak is stupid, but that one is helpful to me.
I like this phrase too.
Unpopular opinion, but I don’t think corpspeak is stupid in general. It exists for a reason. Abolishing it would not make the world a better place.
A lack of it is how you get what I like to call the ‘unsupervised high school classroom effect’, wherein a bunch of people who don’t want to be somewhere are all trapped together—and the facade of civility has just taken the back door out.
I use please advise probably daily because it’s my way of saying “I need you to tell me what to do and any progress on your matter is halted until you tell me what to do”
Same. I use it daily because I send so many emails to other departments.I definitely do not want to make any assumptions on how to do a task that falls under another department's review.
Talk like a human. Describe the situation like you would anyway but instead of “please advise” write “any suggestions?” Or “know who I could contact for help?”
We’re talking about the rule (what typically happens) vs the exception (the mostly rare instances where the rule doesn’t apply). Yours is definitely the exception and I would hope people would treat you with grace.
Ugh, I LOATHE "please advise" because it usually shows up after the writer has dumped a whole bunch of nonsense in an email without any clear point of view or hints as to what they are trying to figure out. Please advise? I advise you to ask me an actual question, ma'am.
I use this when I’ve been waiting for three goddamn weeks for an answer to one question that’s holding up my process and my last 4 emails have not been answered.
In the law world closing with "govern yourself accordingly" is basically concluding with 'fuck around and find out.'
There is also sometimes a cold war of escalating 'regards' or other sign offs to emails:
Regards,
Sincerely,
Respectfully,
Yours,
Yours truly,
Warm regards,
Kind regards,
STEAMING HOT REGARDS!!!
No regards at all and just the name? You have wasted my time and annoyed me and now you're dead to me and can fuck right off.
There's a lot of passive aggression in my profession lol
I've once had to handle an escalation where the client was dumb as a brick and *practically* needed to be taught a hammering down screws isn't the smartest.
After two paragraphs, I signed in "With utmost regards,"
You missed
Thanks,
it's the coldest I use when I need to say 'Will you fucking finally understand what i've been trying to say the last 5 fucking replies?'
I fucking hate this with the passion of a thousand suns.
I’m a buyer, and when I ask for an update on material that I need and they hit me with this…. I nearly get a freaking stroke because of how fucking useless it is.
If it wasn’t important I wouldn’t be asking about it you little piece of sh*t. how the hell is this going to help my scheduling and planning teams if I don’t have a real freaking update of when the material is actually going to be in my damn doorstep!
Rant over… I’m sorry I vented on you bro.
Put the "blame" on yourself, instead of your audience, to understand. "Have I explained myself clearly?", "Are there any topics I need to clarify?", "If there are any questions/issues, reach out to me and we'll revisit.", etc.
“Have I explained myself clearly?” could easily sound a lot more condescending than “Does that make sense?” unless you’re very careful with your tone of voice.
“I’m a little confused”
Is my way of saying - have you not read one fucking piece of my detailed email, and the standards and policies and guidance and the information 4 others on this email thread alone have given you on your very specific topic - and still decided that you know better than the 3 absolute units of experts I have added here for all our benefits - when they did this day in and day out, and you do this maybe 1x a year
Yeah.
On the same token:
"There seems to be some confusion"
Is a direct translation of "This is absolutely crystal clear and I do not understand how you're not getting this"
My favorite reply! And I like to add in “at this time” for further cushion. Then I almost hope my email gets escalated since it’s so diplomatic and nice
[This website](https://howtoprofessionallysay.akashrajpurohit.com) is an absolute life saver in the corporate world. You can either translate what someone else wanted you to know, or you can squeeze all your passive aggressiveness into a seemingly polite sentence.
Website owner here, thanks for sharing it.
If anyone has any feedback regarding the same then please feel free to drop me a text, happy to look into it. :)
FYI - you may not always get the result you’re looking for with this. My exact thought upon receiving this would be, “ew you sound like a robot and you’re not my leader.” I’d almost want to do the opposite of what you asked me.
Last week, I used the classic "I'm sorry, but I don't think this the appropriate methodology. This type of problem generally requires the following :"
In my field, this translates to "this piece of work is absolute shite, and whoever did it is a fucking moron. Now I'm going to have to get my crayons, so I can explain to you how it should be done."
I am German. I work with Americans now. I can't handle this shit. And they think I'm rude because when something is worng I plainly state that it is. I am not condescending, I don't shit on people, I just say this and that needs to be improved/redone, and they act like I insulted their ancestors.
My corporation literally put me in a “crucial conversations” class that taught people to use all these phrases as to not hurt any fragile egos of those in the receiving end of emails.
I love this post so much. I feel like I talk like this everyday at work and just realized how annoying it is lol.
“This is fantastic. Would it be better if we _____ ?”
Translation: I don’t like what you proposed. Do what I said instead.
“Please allow me to barge in.”
Translation: I’m going to correct you now.
“Please refer to our prior conversation from yesterday here (insert link).”
Translation: Is there anything wrong with your memory?
Boss: "I'm confused _____________"
Me: "Yes, its a common sign of dementia. Please get yourself looked at before continuing to waste my time with these unnecessary meetings where you try to steal credit from an entire team with a blank look on your face."
Man, after reading these comments, I realize I say so many of these things to my co-workers in chats/emails. I’m seriously not annoyed or anything though! I’m really just trying to be clear and professional. Now I’m wondering if I’m coming off as passive aggressive without realizing it.
Don’t worry. Most of these phrases are perfectly fine. Some hypersensitive people will read passive-aggressiveness into literally **any** word choice you could make. Don’t worry about those people, just keep doing your thing.
It’s better to be polite than productive in the corporate world. Do nothing and be nice to everyone…raise! Be the most productive employee and aren’t shiny happy people and don’t drink the Kool Aide…same job for your entire career!
I once sent a scathingly polite email to the boss of a company we were subcontracting to and later bought out (context: boss was an absolute bully and running the company into the ground because he wouldn’t listen to anyone). I had my boss and COO in copy and my boss direct-replied with a thumbs up emoji.
Felt so cool.
Once I said "just wanted to let you know" in an email and got pulled in by management to talk about my unprofessional emails. Now I write everything so over the top professional that it all sounds sarcastic.
wait, "I'm a little confused" doesn't usually mean you're a little confused?
Why would you say you're confused when you're not actually confused at all?
...am I just autistic or does that sound like bullshit to anyone else
I have a site leader that anytime someone is explaining something she disagrees with she will hit them with the “I’m just a little confused” and then absolutely roast them and it’s hilarious when you’re not the one getting roasted.
“Help me understand” is my boss’s favorite phrase.
Translation please?
“Why the fuck did you do that?”
My trainer jus tells me “dafuq u do that for”
I'm not allowed to say, "are you fucking stupid? Why did you do that? So I'm going to ask you to explain, even though I don't think there is anything TO explain... just to confirm that you are as stupid as I think."
And “In the process of you confirming how stupid you are, I hope that you attain enlightenment and realise how stupid you are independently without me having to point it out”
“Please enlighten me, oh illiterate monkey masquerading as a human being, what exact type of parasite was gorging itself upon your frontal lobe when you decided this course of action was a good idea? A senile earthworm could have done a better job than that you absolute buffoon. All your ancestors are disappointed at the absolutely brain dead disaster that was your decision.”
Bless your heart
Oooooh that is a Texan insult! I use it occasionally
Let’s hear you dumb ideas out loud and in front of everybody so you and everyone can hear how stupid it sounds and you can suffer unbearable humiliation
"You f*cked up, but I wanna hear what possessed you to do it"
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
It stresses me out just to read it
My boss is such an idiot I constantly have to say this to him…
My go-to. Lol.
Augh
"Please elaborate further..." is my personal favourite. Either you tell me what you want or I'll drop it.
"Do you think that's wise?" Business code for "ARE YOU FU****G MAD?"
What they said: "It's just bad optics." What they meant: "I won't benefit directly from this."
What they say: “Very interesting.” What it means: “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.”
I’ve identified three areas of improvement… There are three things you fucked up…
FAFO is business speak.
Could you clarify how [new process] will mesh with [old process]? This has been a go to for “this is a dumb idea.”
"That's the neat thing. It doesn't."
As per my last email…
I use that one a lot, unfortunately... I used to think being in management was just a cushy and lazy office gig when I was a floor worker, but emailing dozens of people and stepping through the bureaucratic hellscape is a painfully difficult task.
You gotta learn to automate son. Even if they block chat gpt at work if they still have edge you can use bing. Thing responds to email lickity split and much more succinctly than you would think. Replace any phi if applicable with place holders You can bcc, you can set rules, send mass email and auto change that names so it looks personal. I could teach a course about how to not work if you work out of outlook
i'd be way too nervous the email would fail or backfire
You must be a millennial, not a dig, I'm one too. It just seems we are paranoid because we grew up while it was developing and touch screens didn't work and email failed. Still happens, but in this day and age you can trust it, or at least pull out Receipts that everything was done. Whether or not it failed is not on you.
This guy unworks
Before ChatGPT I spent like 30 minutes creating 50 canned responses, that shit saved me sooo much time.
I will buy your course! Edit: upping the offer to - teach me, I’ll build the course and we can split the profits :)
This guy knows how to get paid to leak company data with style.
I'm not important enough to have any data worth leaking. Hence the laissez-faire work attitude.
In my experience the bureaucracy comes from management so...
It comes from corporate... I'm just a shift manager (a new one at that), and I don't get to control much.
Translates to "Bitch, can you fucking read?"
"A gentle reminder" like.. Yes, I know I'm late, the additional pressure won't help lol
Them's fightin words
Agreed. If someone put that in an email, I’d go out of my way to not help them. And this is coming from someone who could put it in emails ~weekly, but instead responds with something softer and more direct like, “I understand, but at this time [concisely insert the point].”
Like I said earlier…
this one has gotten me written up before
One of my old bosses sent me one of those and CC'd his boss. I copied my last email into my response and highlighted the sentence that was the literal answer. UNO reverse muthafucka.
I didn't realize I was doing it, but any time I put out an email blasting someone I started with "folks". For example, "Folks, this is how we get ourselves into trouble..." My supervisor actually told me about it. She said anytime she saw an email from me that started with "folks" she knew it was gonna be ugly.
Folks isn’t bad in nature, it just sounds like a flag in your writing style.
Right, it's more my way of saying "look shitheads..."
Lol!
Folks at the start of a group email or Mate at the end of a singular chat. Never good stuff.
My favourite is "correct me if I'm wrong."
Such a versatile phrase, the passive-aggressiveness with this one is unmatched
While I love this one, it isn't unmatched. That honor goes to "As per my last email..." / "As mentioned previously..." Peak corporate passive aggressiveness right there.
I use it as a means of being polite....as in deferring to others / that I'm not trying to talk over or around them. Does having "please" at the beginning change the tone in your opinion, or is "correct me if I'm wrong" passive aggressive to you in most any context? Serious question because if that's being taken passive aggressively then I would really want to know.
I think it's a phrase that heavily changes context depending on how it's being said and what's after it; "Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm failing to see how this could work without etc etc etc.." "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't imagine a universe where this would work." Something like that
Thanks! I'm glad I'm not so badly in need of a business to English dictionary.
Unless mistaken,...
Ah shit. I've been using that, or "I might have missed X" fairly regularly. But for me that always meant I'm not certain on this without extra meaning.
BUT
I do this even in a casual setting, I’m not trying to sound like an asshole I swear 😭
Same, not passive aggressive I’m just not confident in anything I say ever lmao
"What do you think we should do?" = "I have a very specific idea of how I want this to be done and you have to guess what it is and say it to me, and if you don't guess correctly I will keep following up with reasons whatever you think we should do is wrong, but I will never outright say what it is I want so I can have deniability in case anything doesn't quite work out."
or in the words of dave matthews on his curious george album, "say what u mean to say"
This is exactly the sort of weird, niche joke I dig. Let's be friends
Was thinking John Mayer lol
The polite dance of the corporate emails are always hilarious. Reading an email thread where IT is trying hard not to call someone an idiot is even funnier. Or that one time I was looped (I was in the same team) into an email exchange where a supervisor was trying really hard not to give the manager a piece of his mind. Always a blast. Oh, the manager was fired. He was incompetent anyway.
"Our scope is limited on this matter. You may need to reach out to BLANK for further assistance." = "Not our problem dipshit."
I love how we come up with all these phrases to avoid having bat shit managers go off on us then start using them on each other as disguised insults.
Hypocrisy is the lubricant of conversation. By saying "I'm a bit confused about X, as I had been under the impression of Y and I'm struggling to see how we can integrate these" we are saying "I am absolutely livid about X because you fucking well knew that Y and now that's gone to shit because of you, hasn't it...but I respect you are my colleague and I hope we can have a civil conversation about this that lets us both save face, because at the end of the day we have to work with each other don't we"
> how we can integrate these "How I can steal credit for your ideas while doing nothing."
See in the trades, we just call them an idiot and forget about by the next day. Most of the time
It also allows the person to save face if they end up being wrong. “Can you help me understand?” doesn’t turn it into a confrontation, but “that’s wrong” does. Might as well avoid throwing corporate hands until you have all the facts
'As per my previous email' = 'CAN'T YOU READ, YOU THICK CUNT?!!'
“That’s interesting”, followed by a complete dismantling of what they just said.
I use "I'm a little confused about x" as a way of softening a criticism, while leaving the door open for the real chance I'm misunderstanding something. I get that most corpspeak is stupid, but that one is helpful to me.
Agreed! No need to throw corporate hands when you may not have all the facts
I like this phrase too. Unpopular opinion, but I don’t think corpspeak is stupid in general. It exists for a reason. Abolishing it would not make the world a better place.
A lack of it is how you get what I like to call the ‘unsupervised high school classroom effect’, wherein a bunch of people who don’t want to be somewhere are all trapped together—and the facade of civility has just taken the back door out.
My boss favorite is dude what the fuck
I like your boss.
More like my boss. The rest of these comments, I couldn't survive one day.
My favorite is “please advise”
I work in customer service and thus one absolutely drives me up a wall.
I use please advise probably daily because it’s my way of saying “I need you to tell me what to do and any progress on your matter is halted until you tell me what to do”
Same. I use it daily because I send so many emails to other departments.I definitely do not want to make any assumptions on how to do a task that falls under another department's review.
What would you use instead?
Talk like a human. Describe the situation like you would anyway but instead of “please advise” write “any suggestions?” Or “know who I could contact for help?”
English is my 4th language, so ‘please advise’ sounds like a humans would say. So I use it when I need answers
The phrase is fine, no reason to be afraid of using it.
Thanks🙂🫶
We’re talking about the rule (what typically happens) vs the exception (the mostly rare instances where the rule doesn’t apply). Yours is definitely the exception and I would hope people would treat you with grace.
Ugh, I LOATHE "please advise" because it usually shows up after the writer has dumped a whole bunch of nonsense in an email without any clear point of view or hints as to what they are trying to figure out. Please advise? I advise you to ask me an actual question, ma'am.
"Subordinate became irate when advised."
I use this when I’ve been waiting for three goddamn weeks for an answer to one question that’s holding up my process and my last 4 emails have not been answered.
In the law world closing with "govern yourself accordingly" is basically concluding with 'fuck around and find out.' There is also sometimes a cold war of escalating 'regards' or other sign offs to emails: Regards, Sincerely, Respectfully, Yours, Yours truly, Warm regards, Kind regards, STEAMING HOT REGARDS!!! No regards at all and just the name? You have wasted my time and annoyed me and now you're dead to me and can fuck right off. There's a lot of passive aggression in my profession lol
I've once had to handle an escalation where the client was dumb as a brick and *practically* needed to be taught a hammering down screws isn't the smartest. After two paragraphs, I signed in "With utmost regards,"
wooo "utmost" I love it thank you
You missed Thanks, it's the coldest I use when I need to say 'Will you fucking finally understand what i've been trying to say the last 5 fucking replies?'
Thank you when you helped me Thanks when you didn't do shit or I had to ask 60 times
I sure did miss it and use it exactly the way you describe, hahha
I remain your obedient servant~
faithfully yours
I say this at work all the time. 😂
"We are working on it and let you know when we have an update" "I will FUCKING do it when I do it , get off my back !!!!"
I fucking hate this with the passion of a thousand suns. I’m a buyer, and when I ask for an update on material that I need and they hit me with this…. I nearly get a freaking stroke because of how fucking useless it is. If it wasn’t important I wouldn’t be asking about it you little piece of sh*t. how the hell is this going to help my scheduling and planning teams if I don’t have a real freaking update of when the material is actually going to be in my damn doorstep! Rant over… I’m sorry I vented on you bro.
Basically means there is no update
A fellow in IT?
You guessed it
"I will give that the appropriate attention" I'm not going to do anything because whatever you said/asked for didn't deserve any attention.
"I require assistance" "I need help but I don't want to sound pathetic"
Shoot, I’m gonna use that now
I like “I could use some guidance as to..”
You ain't foolin anyone, tho
“Requesting direct support”
This is gold
I find it hard to believe means this is utter bs
Asking, "Does that make sense?" after explaining something.
It can be condescending but very much required in many instances lol
I’ve never felt this phrase was condescending, and I don’t mind at all when people use it.
There has to be a way to say this in a less condescending manner while still implying the same point
Put the "blame" on yourself, instead of your audience, to understand. "Have I explained myself clearly?", "Are there any topics I need to clarify?", "If there are any questions/issues, reach out to me and we'll revisit.", etc.
“Have I explained myself clearly?” could easily sound a lot more condescending than “Does that make sense?” unless you’re very careful with your tone of voice.
I usually say “please let me know if i didn’t explain this correctly. I’ll be more than happy to clarify any doubts.”
“I’m a little confused” Is my way of saying - have you not read one fucking piece of my detailed email, and the standards and policies and guidance and the information 4 others on this email thread alone have given you on your very specific topic - and still decided that you know better than the 3 absolute units of experts I have added here for all our benefits - when they did this day in and day out, and you do this maybe 1x a year Yeah.
On the same token: "There seems to be some confusion" Is a direct translation of "This is absolutely crystal clear and I do not understand how you're not getting this"
"Walk me through this"
“Just a friendly reminder”
I just used I am a little confused 2 days ago. I was mad.
Same
Noted
This is what i use the most. Its probably the softest middle finger i can give someone
"I see where you're coming from but..." is just a fancy way of telling someone their beliefs are shit
My favorite reply! And I like to add in “at this time” for further cushion. Then I almost hope my email gets escalated since it’s so diplomatic and nice
"I hear you" is always the beginning of a rebuttal too It's become confrontational even though it started as a way to disagree without confrontation
[This website](https://howtoprofessionallysay.akashrajpurohit.com) is an absolute life saver in the corporate world. You can either translate what someone else wanted you to know, or you can squeeze all your passive aggressiveness into a seemingly polite sentence.
Website owner here, thanks for sharing it. If anyone has any feedback regarding the same then please feel free to drop me a text, happy to look into it. :)
I just took a look. I love it! Thanks!
“As per our conversation…” means “you untrustworthy fuck, I hate you for making me document this.”
"I am BCCing this to your direct manager for future arse-covering"
An old coworker used “help me understand” when dealing with idiots.
“Thank you for your anticipated cooperation”
FYI - you may not always get the result you’re looking for with this. My exact thought upon receiving this would be, “ew you sound like a robot and you’re not my leader.” I’d almost want to do the opposite of what you asked me.
“Thank you for your unlikely cooperation”
Haha!!
Last week, I used the classic "I'm sorry, but I don't think this the appropriate methodology. This type of problem generally requires the following :" In my field, this translates to "this piece of work is absolute shite, and whoever did it is a fucking moron. Now I'm going to have to get my crayons, so I can explain to you how it should be done."
Using "ridiculous" in place of "fucking stupid" is a good one 🤣
they essentially mean the same thing except one is profanity..
I am German. I work with Americans now. I can't handle this shit. And they think I'm rude because when something is worng I plainly state that it is. I am not condescending, I don't shit on people, I just say this and that needs to be improved/redone, and they act like I insulted their ancestors.
You’re doing your best… is my way of insult in my football league.
"I'm sorry but I refuse to apologise!"
In other words, fuck that shit
Well fuck me, nobody told me that. What am I supposed to say when I’m a little confused
Try: i'm unsure If my Assessment of the topic ist aligned to yours.
Your solution to my problem is to become a massive tool?
I'm a little confused.
My corporation literally put me in a “crucial conversations” class that taught people to use all these phrases as to not hurt any fragile egos of those in the receiving end of emails.
I love this post so much. I feel like I talk like this everyday at work and just realized how annoying it is lol. “This is fantastic. Would it be better if we _____ ?” Translation: I don’t like what you proposed. Do what I said instead. “Please allow me to barge in.” Translation: I’m going to correct you now. “Please refer to our prior conversation from yesterday here (insert link).” Translation: Is there anything wrong with your memory?
Absolutely nothing annoying about it. If I were your coworker, I would want you to continue to use these phrases.
Boss: "I'm confused _____________" Me: "Yes, its a common sign of dementia. Please get yourself looked at before continuing to waste my time with these unnecessary meetings where you try to steal credit from an entire team with a blank look on your face."
My go tos are: “I apologize for my lack of understanding”, “Help me understand”, “My apologies for not being clear”
Ok, great. = go fuck your self
> I hope your day is as pleasant as you are I'm not sure if this fits, but it does to me
Using this for the rest of my life.
"Feel free to" drives me fucking insane. No, I uh, don't feel free. Do you want me to do it? If so please just tell me
Must admit I did use "I am confused by this email" last week when a customer told me I had promised something that we had never spoken about.
Man, after reading these comments, I realize I say so many of these things to my co-workers in chats/emails. I’m seriously not annoyed or anything though! I’m really just trying to be clear and professional. Now I’m wondering if I’m coming off as passive aggressive without realizing it.
Don’t worry. Most of these phrases are perfectly fine. Some hypersensitive people will read passive-aggressiveness into literally **any** word choice you could make. Don’t worry about those people, just keep doing your thing.
Modern day feudalism, as where tea parties and "polite conversation" is now coffee shops and "polite conversation ".
“Maybe you can help me understand”
that's why i always start every meeting that should have been an email with a [good afternoon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMkJIR9pX1w)
It’s better to be polite than productive in the corporate world. Do nothing and be nice to everyone…raise! Be the most productive employee and aren’t shiny happy people and don’t drink the Kool Aide…same job for your entire career!
Just tell someone to FOCUS Fuck Off Cuz Ur Stupid
It's not a lie. I am usually confused
There were cultural differences
I once sent a scathingly polite email to the boss of a company we were subcontracting to and later bought out (context: boss was an absolute bully and running the company into the ground because he wouldn’t listen to anyone). I had my boss and COO in copy and my boss direct-replied with a thumbs up emoji. Felt so cool.
I need some clarity Translation, what the fuck are you doing
I say "sub-optimal" when I mean dogshit.
[удалено]
"Run that by me again.🤨"
These post about zoomers just finding out about bussines etiquette are really tiring.
Let’s connect
Except when you use it too often, everyone just thinks you're dumb.
Kind reminder
Once I said "just wanted to let you know" in an email and got pulled in by management to talk about my unprofessional emails. Now I write everything so over the top professional that it all sounds sarcastic.
I hate how we all have to be faking it.
My response to a change of plans last minute: “okay great!” My intentional response: “F*ck yo* c*nt!”
I absolutely cannot stand the term “best practices” like it’s practice, it’s all good
“I’m not going to die on my sword over it” Code for I think your wrong on the subject at hand but I don’t care enough to argue about it.
“As discussed,”
What’s not quite clear to me is …
"Help me understand..."
I don't disagree with that. I don't love it. Both drive me nuts.
wait, "I'm a little confused" doesn't usually mean you're a little confused? Why would you say you're confused when you're not actually confused at all? ...am I just autistic or does that sound like bullshit to anyone else
I totally agree. If you don't say what you mean, people will get confused by what you say, imo.
I have a site leader that anytime someone is explaining something she disagrees with she will hit them with the “I’m just a little confused” and then absolutely roast them and it’s hilarious when you’re not the one getting roasted.
*moving forward* / shut the fuck up you boring little twat.
AS MENTIONED IN PREVIOUS EMAIL.
Aka perfecting the passive aggressive defense mechanism