What's with the 'Thanks' people?
Have any of you encountered the folk, typically in a work environment, that whenever they contact anyone, it’s always something along the lines of, “Insert monotone request or statement. Thanks.”
If you do this, or know individuals who do this, what’s the intent behind this style of communication? In my experience, it usually originates from individuals who consider themselves a bit of a VIP. They aren’t necessarily bad people, but are usually either trying to skip proper channels for a request, or correcting someone while having no idea what they’re talking about.
**See this response for additional context.
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I think I know what you mean, OP, but it seems like most of the comments think you are just complaining about people saying “thanks” at the end of an email, or in general.
So forget email for now. This is an in person thing or instant message. Ending an email, even a short one, with “thanks” is fine and normal. But if you message me “please update that ticket. Thanks.” It has a more aggressive tone than you might have meant. It feels like you aren’t asking and so the “thanks” comes off as fake or even sarcastic. Maybe also a bit dismissive or distracted. Like this isn’t a conversation or even a request. I’m telling you what to do and walking away. It’s a bit terse. You’re not even giving me a chance to reply. If you say “please update that ticket” and I say “sure thing” and then you say “thanks”, the tone is much different. That doesn’t sound bad at all.
Again, email is different. Emails are meant to be send and forget. The thanks at the end can even be read as a “thanks for reading”. I think OP is talking about something different, and I agree it feels bad when someone talks to me that way.
As for your actual question, OP, I can’t say I know why they said it that way, but I’d guess they mean no offense, like most people are saying. It could be a second language thing or they really are too distracted or busy to wait for your reply. They don’t want to get into it, they just want to check off that someone is taking care of that one thing
Yeah, it's my own fault for not providing enough context. You are 100% on the ball that this is not regarding an email sign-off. Allow me to remedy the lack of appropriate context.
I'm the IT person at my org. The latest incident that sparked this post was a member of our sales team shooting me a message of, "Hey, send me a new pair of AirPods. Thanks." There's a couple of things wrong with approaching me that way:
Interactions along that line aren't unique, or tied to any specific individual. It's typically a percentage of any employee pool I have ever been a part of. It's the presumption of a done deal that grinds my gears, but I don't have the perspective to guess at their thought process so I was curious if I was missing something. Anyways, thank you for your thoughtful response. It is greatly appreciated.
Ah, you're right then. They are trying to skip the proper channels because, for a lot of office roles, you're trained to do exactly that.
A lot of my job now is emailing and calling people in different organizations and systems. For most of them, they'll technically have forms that look a lot like a ticket system but their purpose isn't organization - it's a filter. If you are in the know you contact them directly. This is true of contacting my department as well, if you're filling out a ticket you're probably on the bottom of the pile and if we've given you direct contact information we want you to contact us directly.
This leads to a habit of trying to guess who you're supposed to contact too. The worst that can happen is you just get linked back to the ticket system so may as well try. Being good at your job involves building up a whole list of people you contact to not be put in form purgatory.
While an IT ticket system superficially looks the same as the labyrinth of everything else we have to deal with, the difference is it's internal. Either everyone can contact you directly anyway or the 'wrong' people can, so it doesn't have the same effect of creating a curated list. It's also an actual system (usually) instead of just being an alternative way to send an email that gets dumped into a shared inbox.
So yeah, it's really easy to just assume IT is exactly the same as the rest of your communications if you don't know any better. They're just communicating with you how they would anyone else. It is insane and inefficient but that's just how it is.