Send me a blue boy!

A communication professional's job is like an abandoned drum, almost all other functions in the company beat it in the way they like and they expect it to sound awesome, all the time. When talking about overlap of job functions, the confusion will be more than what the poor police men had with the cross dressed sadhu. We do human resource jobs, administration jobs, sales jobs, marketing jobs and many more. For instance, once I sent out a mail to announce the launch of new job referral portal for HR, of course with all relevant links. And next day onwards, I started getting at least 4-5 resumes per day, in my inbox. In short, communications is not anymore a supporting function, it's the super function which unfortunately can't fly to reach everywhere.

But the fun part of the work is, however, cannot be overlooked. I'll talk about just some mails here.

Recently one of my colleagues, an internal communications manager, told about this interesting mail that found its way to her inbox. She often (mistakenly) gets mails for another colleague, who has a similar name and this one was the weirdest of all. The mail read "Send me a blue boy for a day'. Though a  bit startled, she figured out what the mail was about as she went through it. Apparently, sender of this mail wanted support from a helper, who wears a blue uniform to work. My colleague wrote back that it is a demeaning term and refrain from using that, besides informing about the wrong recipient. We had a good laugh on the (unintended) humor sense of the person who sent the mail.

This in turn reminded me of a couple of mails I got while I was in a factory location. One was about the importance of visitors to wear shoes inside the factory premises. After telling that it is mandatory to wear a pair of shoes inside the facility and those without shoes will not be allowed inside, the sender emphasized it by telling 'to avoid embracement at the gate, please make sure that visitors are wearing shoes'. It sounded like "Hey you are not wearing shoes, give a hug and go inside'. Err, not sounding right, I know.

Second one was about...well you read the rest to believe it. The mail's subject line was ' Rooming charges: issues' and I instantly got a feeling that it is about some new guest house or sorts. The mail was addressed to the manager of mobile service provider and it read "please refer our meeting on ..........., regarding the rooming charges. It has been noticed by most of our employees that the rooming charges are not levied as per the..."

Besides this, there are extremely caring colleagues who promptly forward virus alerts 'directly' from Norton and McAfee and some others tell the tale of a lost pen gifted by dad. While HR departments of organizations are trying hard to deal with attrition, there are mails on a daily basis telling adieu, bye and sayanora. All of them has a 'sad part' telling that if they had hurt anyone during his tenure with the company, that was completely unintentional.

Though typos are commonplace, these examples do not fall under this category.
PS: If you find any typos in this post, those are merely coincidental ;)

Photo courtesy: Michael of Scott's photostream on Flickr