War on Sigfiles!

Ok, here’s what we’ll use to start the fire du jour.  “If I have to scroll to read your sigfile it is TOO DAMNED BIG, PERIOD! “ You need to FIX IT!!

No one reading an email needs to know what your street address and suite number are. If they want to send you snail mail they can look it up on your website.

Your email address pops up when they hit reply. Don’t list it below too. That makes you look just plain dumb. 

If your company name is there link it to your site  Don’t list it separately as www.technicallychallenged.com 

How in hell do I comply with THIS statement?! I have to read it to know it’s not for me.  “If you are not the addressee or the intended recipient, do not read this e-mail. ” Attorneys might say it has some kind of meaning and maybe it does but to me it seems about as useful as a mattress/pillow tag.

Finally, No one cares about that crap about it being private etc etc. It means nothing. And when you decide to argue otherwise, don’t start typing until you have reviewed the license agreement of every piece of software that you own… and then also review all the software you use and don’t own. Then when you DO make that argument remember this same sigfile goes on those lists of funnies you send like the dog licking the back of your screen and the pumpkin carved like a guy puking his guts.

There ARE services that send the email equivalent of a registered letter. Use those when you need or want some kind of security. Don’t annoy the rest of the world with your self-absorbed BS of announcing that I am supposed to actually call your phone number and clean my servers when you send me the recipe for Chocolate Cake in a Coffee Cup that I am not supposed to have.

I am not picking on any single person here. I have just spent the morning looking at lots of old emails and seeing a LOT of chaff in the wheat. If I go back far enough I can even find mine back in the day when we all had our personal mottos and statements at the end. 

Let’s say the rule ought to be that sigfiles have no more characters than an SMS message. I may have to go work on my own now.

Oh, final note…make it horizontal all the way across the page and not more than 3 lines.

This will look funny 5 years from now when we all have everyone’s info planted in our brains.

Why Would Anyone Ever Recruit a Placed Candidate?

I saw this question in another forum. There was a longer explanation with the answer but I didn’t include it because it doesn’t have a lot to do with my position.

“Q: Can I re-recruit a placed candidate?  Yes. There is absolutely no statute or case anywhere prohibiting this.”

My position, since I have had one maybe a few days into the business, has been that I will not ever recruit someone or even place someone out of the company that paid me/us for him or her for money…ever, under any circumstances.

This applies to our company too now but it has always been my personal policy regardless of where I worked. That is just something I don’t want clients to ever have to worry about and something I want to be able to say. I have gotten the “It’s ok you can help me, I am initiating this.” calls and I simply explain that I can’t and won’t. If the person is in that bad of a place I might give him some free advice but this is just something I think the world is better off with us not doing for more reasons than I care to count. “Getting caught” is not one of the concerns.

Maybe it is like this…if I can’t figure out how to write about it in a blog entry then I won’t do it. I don’t have time to try to write a blog about why I sold a product and then reclaimed it and sold it again.

I was told a story about this when I first met someone much more known in this industry at the time and my relationship with him has been stained by that story ever since. I’ll never forget the words “They had her for 8 years, that’s long enough.” That just made me feel kind of sick.

This whole idea feels kind of like discussing best use cases for incest. Maybe if there’s a nuclear holocaust and only 2 related people left…