The Breakdown of Communication

I received an email from my project manager this morning.
Subject: B 4 U R busy - C me
Text Body: :-)


A few years back a couple of us at work had to explain to an intern that it is unacceptable to use leet speak in an email. Furthermore, it is entirely, 100% unacceptable to us it in a work email.

For the love of FSM, there is little to no use for it at all. Leet Speak was improvised when texting had to be done on a standard phone number pad. “YOU” used to take 7 key strokes. “U” only took 2. Then, through the miracle of computer programming, the world was gifted with various predictive text applications. At that point “YOU” only took 3 key strokes.

Now, between Smart Phones and cell phones with full QWERTY keyboards it is very easy to type in full sentences, punctuation and all. I admit text messages are “limited” to 160 characters but very few texts take more than that. Plus, every phone I’m aware of through the miracle of computer programming breaks up messages longer than 160 characters into two texts automatically.

Most importantly, the computer programmers that created email applications saw fit to NOT limit emails to 160 characters. One can see that by just looking at this email. I surpassed it several paragraphs ago.  So again, there is absolutely no reason a professional business person trying to communicate with another professional would say, “B 4 U R busy – C me.”