Monday, October 10, 2011

Greeting, not Gritting!


Dear XYZ,

I'm sending this to ask you for a brief recommendation of my work that I can include in my LinkedIn profile. If you have any questions, let me know.

Thanks in advance for helping me out.

-Insert name of the requester here

This is a standard Linkedin template for asking people for recommendations. To be superfluous, Linkedin is the business oriented brethren of facebook with a lot less (garbage) and a lot more (networking tools). Receiving and giving recommendations is a core part of the linkedin experience, where people usually write very nice stuff about others with the hope to get the same in return.

A person has recently sent me one of these emails. I feel pity for these emails because they try to sound personal, but they aren't. Secondly, people often send these emails in batches, i.e. to everyone in their contact list which further diminishes the personal touch.

In today's era of auto completing forms, pre-made templates and bot generated emails, it is sometimes too much to expect a personalized email even from your close friends. The impersonal email phenomenon has stretched its evil aura of influence in to short messaging service, too.

Once upon a time not too long ago, SMS was treated as the most personal and surefire way of one to one communication. I remember hearing people say "the sound of SMS receipt cannot be ignored or missed by mortal beings--people might ignore calls, delete emails without reading them or burn direct marketing snail mails, but they are bound to read SMSs delivered to their cell phones.

Well, does the above still hold true? Not really. Thanks to spamming in the name of SMS marketing, people are getting bombarded with promotional short messages from dusk till dawn. However, that's not a big problem, nor is the tradition of sending SMS to the customers is unheard of. In fact, most other Asian telecom operators send more SMS to their customers than our operators send.

But the problem is, along with the plethora of impersonal SMS and emails being exchanged, we are getting used to this impersonal style of communication. Every year during festivals, I get a number of SMS from friends, colleagues, contacts and acquaintances. Not a single of them seems addressed to me. You ask me why, and I am telling you why.

A person who never addresses me anything but buddy sends a message stating "May you and your family be blessed with blessings on this blissful occasion- Mr. XYZ, doing ABC job". It's a dead giveaway--you have been hit by a carbon copy (!).

Once native to email clients like Eudora and Outlook, CC culture is paralyzing SMS now. Long time ago an operator launched a fancy service called "group SMS" which had the capability of sending 10 people from your contact list the same message in one go. Charging could be done individually (i.e. X amount per message delivered) or an overall group rate could be imposed.

But due to the arrival of advanced phones, that service has lost its charm. Nowadays one can easily CC the same message to everyone in his contact list. This means a meager 255 from the SIM or virtually unlimited contacts from the phone can get your "blissful blessings" message within a short time frame, and to make it even better, one recipient will not never know who else got the same message, which is in contrast to email CC where everyone in CC can see each other’s email addresses.

Just like the recommendation seeking Linkedin email, the content of these messages are impersonal, boring, and they give out an essence of "doing something that needs to be done instead of doing something that feels good to do".

The psychology behind these messages is mostly linked with the need to remain connected. A quick analysis of the messages I received during Eid this year tells me that the highest number of messages came from business partners, followed by lesser known acquaintances and a few stragglers, err strangers (!).

Surprisingly, I received similar messages from some family members and friends, too. I know life is busy and it’s busier during Eid holidays, but it doesn't take more than a minute to write a personal message. This year, I tried sending personal messages to some near and dear ones whom I couldn't meet. The result was pleasant.

I received wholehearted and relevant thank you replies. When I sent them greetings, I tried to make the messages sound as personal as they can be. I wrote stuff that an auto-generated or templated message can never convey.

Our life is hectic, and we are alarmingly becoming robotic as the days are rolling. To put an end to this miserable situation, we should keep no stones unturned, and every opportunity of bringing back the days of adda and casual conversations (the real Social Networking) should be availed.

By the way, what I really want to write as a recommendation to the person mentioned in the beginning of this article is this:

"I know ABC from my university days. No matter how hard I tried to avoid him by switching phone numbers and changing email addresses, he has managed to keep contact. During our brief time together as classmates, I've seen him as a slacker, a bad influence and a horribly uncouth person. He never tucked his shirt or t-shirt, and he could never avoid the influence of local dialects while speaking in Bangla or English. Despite of being a senior student, it took him more than six years to complete his undergraduate degree. He has a great skill of bragging; he never runs out of fresh new stories about his special exploitations and escapades. I wonder how he ended up as a business graduate, and to make it further amazing, he is now holding a respectable (!) job in a reputed (!!) organization. I wish him all the best, but I feel pity for the organization at who's expense the well-being of Mr. XYZ is being achieved."

I also got a blissful and blessing-filled Eid greeting from him, too, but I felt like gritting instead of being greeted.

Wrote this article a few days after Eid Ul Fitr 2011.

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