Dumbing myself down at work to meet NT standards has saved me hours of stress lately

This is a little bit of a shitpost but also I’ve genuinely started doing this as someone that works in an inside sales support/admin type role.

For whatever reason, I’ve learned since I started at my current job that asking sales reps to read an email containing more than 2 sentences (not to mention whether or not they possibly retain any of that information) is pretty much tantamount to holding them at gunpoint until they can defuse a bomb. They just completely shut down.

I once spent probably like 10-15 minutes just revising a single paragraph over and over again, trying to perfectly tailor it to the fucking nitwit I needed answers from in order to leave as little room for confusion as possible. I came back from my lunch break that day and was almost immediately graced with a call from this smarmy asshole, starting the call off with “you know what I *hate*, [my name]?” then proceeded to whine at length about me daring to write out all my thoughts in a clear and concise manner instead of calling him to get absolutely 0 clear answers and even more work handed to me.

My obvious bitterness aside, even with the sales reps I work with that are generally pleasant and competent, or just a billion times less obnoxious than that guy, if you ask more than one question then one of them just ends up getting ignored. Almost every single time without fail! It could literally be something as simple as “how many bags of chips do you want and also what kind” and 90% of these assholes will just say “3” and then immediately move on with their day.

One day I needed quick and simple answers for something but would have probably rather drilled a phillip’s head into my eyeball than suffer through conversation with this guy- yes, same one- and genius finally struck me. I’ve always loved writing and have a lot of problems with brevity in general, so I usually take a lot of care typing out my emails to make sure they’re as clearly worded and professional sounding as possible. Not this time. I decided to turn my brain off and forwarded a client’s email to him with only the following:

[Rep name], I need the following info to place this order:

- Quantity

- Type of material

I got a reply back with the exact answers I needed less than 2 minutes later and was totally baffled. Ever since seeing this work, I was able to refine my strategy for sending questions through email when I really don’t feel like talking on the phone, and naturally developed a few key rules.

1. Use their name at the very beginning of the email to signify that you need something from them specifically. This one is especially important for larger email chains including a bunch of other people, or any type of email you send on a more regular basis that they’d usually be able to ignore.

2. Type out any information that you absolutely need them to read First. After that, separate any questions or information you need from them into bullet points or a separate, indented paragraph that will visually stick out. The simpler the better.

3. When in doubt, type the email out how you think that they would send it themselves. Then add punctuation (seriously), skim over it for any glaring grammar/spelling mistakes, and send!

This has made my life so much easier recently. None of this is intuitive whatsover though. Why are neurotypicals are so fucking complicated