Do other people find “plz” rude?
GA guys,
There’s something that’s been bugging me at work and I wonder if it’s just me. When people in the workplace are writing on their PC, either in email or in some kind of instant messaging, they always use abbreviations like “ga” for good afternoon, “gm” for good morning”, “pl” or “plz” for please and “tx” or “ty” for thank you. Which to me seems too informal for the workplace.
I don’t mind if it’s friends chatting, but when it’s somebody in the workplace whom you’ve never spoken to before, I think it’s too informal. Arguably, part of the point of writing “please” and “thank you” is that you took the time to bother to say them in the first place – and changing them to “plz” and “ty” defeats the purpose.
But as I’m writing this, I think to myself how pompous I bet I seem to some people, so what do you think?
When people at work get an error message in their software, and they email me with “Plz advice on the below error and revert on the same, tx” it makes me want to scream!
Well you know what I think! But then I know I can be pompous and I’m ok with that.
I do not think it is acceptable for people at work who don’t know you to use ‘plz’ etc. I guess I could cope if ‘plz’ (etc) was used by people at work who you are friendly with or who you know well, but even that would annoy me. It doesn’t take that long to take the time to type a few extra letters! But then I hate text language and think everyone should write in proper English, even in a text message
Write more interesting error messages and see what they think of it.
“It broke plz lgf kthxbye.”
Change all the friendly input sanitation errors to: “PEBKAC stfu”.
Or create a rosetta stone that they have to reference to decode your reply.
Hmm…. I don’t think I’m being very serious anymore.
I would love to do all those things. Maybe I’ll implement it but only set it for certain users. And I even understood everything you said except for “lgf”.
Actually, in our application at work, somebody changed all the useful error messages to “an unexpected error has occurred, please contact support”. When I asked why, they said it was for “technical reasons”. They may as well have just put “it broke plz kthxbye” because it’s about as useful.