The Method of Madness

Chad and I recently decided to upgrade our desktop computer to the latest version of Windows the other day. I had found a really cheap student price for the Professional upgrade, so we snagged it and I began the process of installing it.

Here we are, two days later, and Windows 7 is still not installed on this machine.

Yes, hope is a Windows installation.

Maybe hope is too philosophical a topic for a Gen Y’er to talk about (with most of us being busy writing about how to be successful, live abroad, or some other feel-good idea), but I’ll take it head on anyway. From my perspective, hope is simply the desire that the future will undoubtably go in your favor. In my case, it was that Windows would, at some point, install properly. In your case it might be something different, but this is my blog post, so you’re stuck with the Windows analogy.

First, the EXE file wouldn’t run. Can’t write files to the folder the EXE is in? Let’s change the permissions… Didn’t work? How about… no… Maybe that… what the hell…

The above is a snippet of my inner dialogue for about the past two days. Each time something failed, I tried another approach that I hoped would work this time around.

There’s that word again, hope. What does it take to have hope, anyway? In my case, knowledge of computers, files, and Windows give me ample hope that I will come up with a solution. Somehow. So, then, I would wager to say that one can create hope by obtaining the relevant knowledge, or perspective, on a situation to see it in a different light – to try something different. In contrast false hope would refer to, as one of my favorite quotations says, trying the same thing over and over and expect something different every time. All in all, hope to me appears to be one part know-how and one part drive-to-do. You gotta have the smarts and the attitude to execute.

I wager that other things aside from knowledge can give hope. What gives you hope?

In the job-strapped, overly-stressed, post-Recession climate it seems most people have forgotten the basics of etiquette. In this digital age, where it is becoming more common to type than talk, the impetus to have a strong grasp of the fundamentals of writing has never been more appropriate.

Not-so shockingly, it seems this has passed through the minds of most professionals.

Daily, I receive emails that appear as if they were written by a retarded Middle-school student with a bad case of fibromyalgia. Seriously. From missing subject lines, to no salutation, to butchered English and poor formatting, these people (who range from recruiters to Executive level), should their inability to create a competent piece of prose be exposed, would more than likely be expelled from their jobs.

I work with HR frequently, and most commonly with recruiters. Yes, the same recruiters who staunchly declare that a mere one typo will get an applicant disqualified from consideration. I say now: check yourselves. I’ve yet to meet a recruiter who was the paragon of English grammar, and if you’re disqualifying applicants based on their linguistic crimes that makes you A HYPOCRITE.

There are numerous online resources that you can tap with a quick click of that ‘Google’ button to get grammar advice. It is ludicrous to say, “I don’t have time” because you disrespect not only yourself, but your candidate/vendor/whomever that you’re penning your email to. You look like a fool, and the person on the other end will definitely feel like you didn’t want to spend the time necessary to craft an appropriate letter. Further, in the case of the corporate recruiter, you damage your company’s brand. Who wants to work for a company whose employees don’t have a mastery of basic English writing skills? Not me, sir.

Really, though, the worst of it is that you look incredibly lazy. Spellcheck, automated emails, all of the tools in our technology tool belt do quite well at exposing these slothful sods. If you send out a poorly-worded email, that means you’ve ignored the red and green swiggles Microsoft uses to alert us to errors. Incorrect automated emails once again means you didn’t take the time to even look at what you’re writing. Do people seriously not understand that writing, in essence, is the manual process of transcribing what are conscious thoughts in your brain? In other words, your writing is an extension of yourself, and thereby a reflection of who you are.

You’d better check the mirror.