Stick Up Your Etiquette
My emails tend to be direct, informal, and courteous. Every so often, someone responds with a more formal structure, and puts my favorite informal words in quotes.
Dear Yami,
Blah blah blah. If this is indeed their "goof" then blah blah blah.
Sincerely,
Person
This drives me absolutely bonkers. I start off feeling boorish and uncultured, then I realize why, take a hearty dislike to the person on the other side of the terminal, think about other situations in which I have felt similarly awkward, and soon I'm pissed off about code-switching and class stratification. It's not that I mind turning into a screaming Marxist, but really, the people who maintain Caltech's email database should not be my prime ideological influences.
Ah, but as Dame Edith Rosenstein pointed out, “Nobody can make you feel inferior without your social security number”.