Thursday 24 November 2005

Telegram

Has anyone received a telegram lately? I hadn't seen a telegram for ages, but yesterday, some recruitment consultant decided to send me an email that looked like a telegram, or a telegram that was wrapped up in an email... here's how it goes:

Dear Chiranth,

UNIX ADMIN / LAN-WAN / WIN-NT in Bangalore on 23.11.2005 (Wednesday ) & SHIFT LEAD / DCC / PC SUPPORT in Bangalore on 26.11.2005 (Saturday)--Inperson Interviews with CMM Level 5 Accenture

Regards
[name snipped]


What's wrong with chappie? Being a quick fire mode of communication, does email give license to put basic letter writing skills to the backburner? My English teacher would have been apalled if she saw this.

I received a suggestion that I should send this bloke back an equally short reply, but I want to make it harder for him to read it. Perhaps, I should avoid using the spacebar while writing back, or I should toggle between upper and lower case for every alphabet.

Any other suggestions?

1 comment:

Chiranth Channappa said...

I responded back to this recruitment guy with the following email


Dear [name snipped],

I appreciate your informing me of these interviews. I am
currently not looking for a job change, and therefore, was
not interested in attending either of these interviews. I
apologise for not replying sooner as I needed time to draft
the rest of this email; I have tried to analyse the level of
your writing skill, which in my opinion, is unbecoming of a
recruitment consultant.

Firstly, your email looks more like a telegram than a formal
letter of communication. There is absolutely no sense of
grammar, composition, or even basic sentence construction.
Let us observe the first phrase that has been written in
your email

"UNIX ADMIN / LAN-WAN / WIN-NT in Bangalore on 23.11.2005
(Wednesday)"

Can you tell me what exactly does this mean? Are you saying
you are ging to install the Win-NT Operating System on your
computer on Wednesday with the help of a Unix admin over a
LAN or WAN? Please note that the word "interview" appears
for the first time after the dash that you've written.
Until then, one has absolutely no inkling that you're a
recruitment consultant.

Secondly, the word "inperson" should be spelt with a hyphen
as "in-person".

Thirdly, the phrase "with CMM Level 5 Accenture" is hardly a
phrase of English. Can you point out which word in this
constitutes the noun & which one makes up the adjective? Or
incase both "CMM level 5" & "Accenture" are supposed to be
nouns, what is the relation between the two?

Fourthly, could you care to capitalise your sentences
correctly? You seem to have gone overboard with the usage
of upper case. There is absolutely no need to capitalise
the words "Admin", "Shift Lead" and "Support". There is
also incorrect to capitalise the first letters of the words
"in-person", "interviews" and "level", the way you've done.

Lastly, why does your subject line consist of the same text
that has been used in your letter? The purpose of a subject
line is to give an indication of what the content is about.
To rewrite the entire content of your email in the subject
line is not only childish, but also looks ugly.

My intention is not to insult your language or writing
skills, but I do not respond to emails that are worthy only
of a five-year old. Unless your next letter displays better
sentence-construction and pays closer attention to grammar,
you can be sure it will be deleted unread.

Regards,
Chiranth