I recently received an email from a contact, Joe. At the end of Joe’s message was a sentence that read, “Please excuse misspellings; sent by Blackberry.”
For some reason, those six, simple words caused me to pause and think, “Of all the messages with which Joe could have closed, why did he choose this one?”
I automatically started to think of answers to my own question: Is Joe overwhelmed? Are “small details” not his forte? Does Joe generally make excuses for his lack of attention? Or, perhaps he spends much of his day commuting around Los Angeles, in which case I guess I should be thankful that he would rather focus on his driving (keeping the rest of us alive) than worried about proper spelling and grammar!?!
For whatever the reason, this “general disclosure” smells to me like an excuse, which is BADfortheBRAND™! Although Joe’s intentions were probably good, it just goes to show you how something seemingly insignificant can send the wrong message.
To this day, I can not remember what Joe’s original message was about, but what I do recall is the bad impression it left with me.
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