Surviving the Workday

Yes, I do know how to spell farewell, but there’s a story here. Once when I worked for a big publishing company as an editor, the intern was dismissed at the end of the term. On her last day, she sent an email to everyone with the subject line “farwell” and I thought, Intern, as much as I like you, this is a good example of why you are being dismissed and not hired. You can’t be an editor and be a terrible speller. Just use the spellcheck.

Hit ’send,’ then hit the door has some funny “farwell” emails. I would always choose to err on the side of cautiousness with a polite email, but I still found the emails amusing. Apparently these sorts of humorous or confessional emails are the result of two trends:

Will Schwalbe, coauthor of “Send: Why People E-mail So Badly and How to Do it Better,” said the farewell e-mail was a reflection of two intersecting trends: the universality of e-mail and the confessional spirit of the times, which have resulted, as he put it, in “the democratization of the process.”

In the pre-computer world, Schwalbe said, “Personnel wrote something — a memo, Xeroxed — generally, you didn’t get to do it. They did it. But what had been an HR function is now a personal function.” That, he said, leads to a different sort of message.