Nobody likes receiving passive-aggressive emails. Having to deal with passive-aggressive coworkers may be a pain. Fortunately, a little purposeful compliance can put things right. In this story a woman describes how she gave her passive-aggressive coworker a lesson in respectful communication. Scroll down to read the complete story and see how her coworker reacted when she had her request granted.
Source: Reddit
Short little story from my new job I’ve had for a month. I recently moved to a new state and got a new job managing an office in a medical field.
Every morning, one of my responsibilities is emailing a list of patients by the type of appointment they had and the details of their appointment (called an encounter) to Records from the day prior. I separate documents by type of appointment and attach the files to a single email with the date. Having worked in records before, sorting by date and having sub-categories for type was easiest for me, and this is the way the new place trained me to do it.
After about two weeks of doing it the way I was told/the way I thought was easiest, I got a very abrupt passive-aggressive email in response. “Send encounters each in individual emails. Thanks, AngryRecordsPerson. ” I tried to reach out for clarification. Do they want an entire list of one appointment type in an individual email? How the heck do you want it done? Just tell me. There was no answer from my question, so I just continued to send it how I was taught.
Another week goes by, and I get another passive-aggressive email. “Per my last email, send encounters each in individual emails.” No please, thank you, or response to my questions at all.
So I maliciously complied. It took about 2 extra hours of my time, but I did as she asked and painstakingly sent each encounter in a separate email. One single encounter per email. That equaled about 60 emails back to back to back instead of one nicely laid out email sorted by type.
2 days of this and I quickly got “Please stop. You are cluttering my email. You may send me one email with the encounter types attached. Thanks, AngryRecordsPerson. “
Yeah, I thought so. I continued to send the emails about how I was trained, and I haven’t had a problem since.
I wanted to add that by the end of the work day today, I found out the records girl was also new and she got to learn that part of the job the hard way, unfortunately. I feel a little bit bad for f***ing with her like that, but in the end I think she may have learned that a little bit of email etiquette can go a long way.
Here are a few comments on the story where it was originally posted:
