Rude

I had to postpone the Go Live date of a project I've been working on for nearly 2 years. When I sent out the cancellation notice I received a bastion of emails from people I've never heard from in the past literally yelling at me for not including their distribution list--didn't I know that I was affecting their schedules and work blah blah blah blah blah?!?

Good Lord! The message I sent basically communicated was that nothing was changing and it was business as usual.

While reading all this my phone rang with an external number. I picked it up and some guy with a cop voice berated me for not including his distribution list and not reading the contents of someone else's email. Really aggressive, really loud. I just stayed quiet on my end of the line and finally said "well, send me that distribution list address and we'll include it next time, we done here?" I did my level best to control myself but I still ended up putting the receiver down a bit hard and muttering "dick" under my breath.



I looked the guy up on our internal directory...an architect. His photo looked like a bag of potatoes with a mustache. In my head I was formulating sarcastic rejoinders to respond to his follow up email commanding me and others to get our shit together. I managed to not do this. I took a deep breath and replied to the original email with the information requested and said thank you.

I felt my mind being polluted by this encounter...I wanted to know who this guy's boss was, to humiliate him or somehow make things difficult. However, I never want to have this kind of a war--he is still a stranger to me, has nothing to do with me and didn't show up in my life until yesterday. In my mind I took his image and his words and shrank them to a microscopic size and put them in a trash bin filled with other wriggling microbes.

A few moments later I got an email from someone who called me a Rock Star. I copied the words from this, increased the font size and made it my desktop image for the day. Later on I got news that I was accepted into a program that I thought I missed the deadline for (they made an exception for me) and also was treated to drinks with my boss. Really glad potato cop wasn't floating in the background to spoil my buzz.