Have you ever had an e-mail ruin your day? I sent an e-mail today to a client I did a small job for a couple weeks ago, asking about the status of my check. Anyone who’s ever done any freelance work, especially when it’s your only support, knows how important those checks are. I was just asking nicely about it, and I received a really shockingly mean and snarky reply.
I debated whether to respond at all, and in the end I did send something back to him that made me feel somewhat better. Whether I should have sent any reply at all is debatable. I didn’t expect to get any more work from them anyway. But for a while it really disturbed me, and I felt like the only way to stop stewing about it was to reply somehow.
E-mail seems to have an immediacy and starkness that other forms of communication don’t have. And I know that people will often say something in an e-mail that they
1. may not even mean,
2. would never say to someone’s face, and
3. will regret later after the heat passes.
Do you ever write out e-mails in the heat of battle and then not send them? Do you send them and later regret it? This stuff fascinates me.
What recourse do you have against them?Remember how I mentioned I think you should offer hosting services along with your design service? One advantage is you can suspend them when they don’t pay up.
Well I think they will be paying – that’s not the problem. It’s just the really unprofessional way people can be, and my propensity for letting it get to me. Which is my problem, not his.
If I’m not the King of hotheaded email responses, I’m at least a second cousin with a harelip. Anger heals!
I really try to let heated responses sit for an hour. Or overnight.
I’m not always successful. And sometimes I send them even after a “cooling off” period.
The most recent email I’ve sent that I regret sending was presented at mediation to support my estranged wife’s assertions that I was violent and self-destructive. I don’t email as much now and speak even less.