I just want to give some background of my thoughts on emails and proper etiquette before I go into what happened. I get my emails sent to my phone so I’m always in tune with everything coming to me and I probably check my phone every half hour or so for any new material (unlike CK4 whose check time is probably about once every other minute). I would think this is probably near the norm for anyone who gets email to their phone. If you don’t get it to your phone and have to check your computer for it, then there is obviously a delay in response time regarding emails. Then there are the people who probably don’t check it at all, or every day or so, or worse every week. Averaging all of these possibilities together, I give a person a 24-48 hour window to respond to my email without me taking action. After this period of time, a call is in order. I rarely use email for personal use even though this is one of my preferred methods, I find it’s not for others. I do get some inquiries for work but this isn’t a high tech industry and most communication is done through the telephone (*gasp*) with people who don’t even have an email address. So considering I’m not CK4 and sending out thousands of emails, I don’t get too many situations like the one I received today.

I shipped out a damaged soldering iron to a company for repair. The iron runs off of a gas cartridge which along with a starter lights the flame to solder. So a few days later I send the company an email asking if they received it and get a response back verbatim:
“Oh,,You mean the FUCKING BOMB you sent by UPS? NEVER NEVER send a device attached to a gas canister as it is extremely dangerous, ie ;AIR FLORIDA jet goes down in the EVERGLADES and GATORS eat your granny ……..BAD SHIT BAWANNA SEE Title 40, Code of Federal Regulations , Section 172.101, 10 CFR 40, 10 CFR 42, etc.” It goes on but it’s not as funny.

Personally I think he may have been over reacting a bit because unless it spontaneously combusts, there’s no real chance of it going off, but nonetheless his point was well taken and I felt like a complete jackass. So my point is that usually when someone is yelling at you in person, you can do your best to calm the person down and have a say in the matter, but when I got this I just had to sit there and read it while this guy was ripping into my guts. I especially like how he capitalized the keywords to really make a point. Everyone knows that caps means your yelling and the “everglades” and “granny” were especially useful for emphasis.

All in a days work…