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United States24761 Posts
My mom often complains to me how the 'age of e-mail' means that you can never get in touch with anyone when you need to. "It's really easy to ignore an e-mail" she says. For the most part when she goes on tirades about topics like these I just ignore her. However, I'm also getting frustrated with similar things.
In the past few weeks I've been unable to get in contact with people at offices, professors, etc for several days in a row. If I send a question like "Dr. Smith I was wondering if you could tell me more about your research in solid-state physics" and I don't get a response, fine. I understand that. What bothers me is when I send an e-mail "I would like to meet with you next week on Tuesday, Wed, Thur, or Fri; please let me know what time works for you" with full justification, and they just don't respond. After 24-48 hours you try calling and leave a voicemail. You send a follow up e-mail. You keep trying to call. You ask the main office of the institution of they have any other suggestions, which they invariably don't.
This is the kind of crap I'm seeing. A lot. It's not that big of a deal when it's in your area since you can just stop by until you bump into the person, but when you are dealing with people who are far away there is nothing you can do.
I like to think I'm reasonable about this. If I send e-mails to five people, all of them important (for both parties) and requiring a prompt response, and one of them doesn't get back to me, sure, I can send a reminder. "I haven't heard from you yet and I want to pick a time next week to meet. Please let me know when is good for you." But what I'm describing isn't the exception. I'd say in the past few weeks more than 50% of the important e-mails I've sent have been outright ignored. In each case I've stopped to think, maybe it's me. Could it be I've bugged someone multiple times when I shouldn't have? Could it be that I'm trying to contact the wrong person? Did I miss a reply from them? I'm pretty sure in almost every (if not every) case the answer is no.
It's also fun when you try to call an office in the heart of their business hours and can't get through to a person on the phone. You'd think they'd want to help you with things like "who do I send the check to?" when the information isn't available on their website (why, I don't know).
And the time I made an appointment for something, got there, and the person I was supposed to meet with wasn't there because he 'forgot about it' was priceless.
 
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On May 26 2012 00:01 micronesia wrote:
And the time I made an appointment for something, got there, and the person I was supposed to meet with wasn't there because he 'forgot about it' was priceless.
Priceless indeed. It also occurs to me occasionally although I'm just a student. Finding certain lecturers are like finding MIA men. No information whatsoever and so on like your case although yours is of course more essentially important ;P.
I don't understand why people would ignore other emails especially when it comes to important matters? I'm sure people would check their office emails a lot (especially with internal correspondence with other staff / department etc). So what gives?!
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Well professors don't like to check or reademail, period. I sent an email once about attending his group meeting and he just deleted it because it's from someone who isn't in his group and he doesn't know who I am.
And for them, there's always something more important than meeting a student, especially an undergrad one.
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United States24761 Posts
On May 26 2012 03:17 Veldril wrote:
Well professors don't like to check or reademail, period. I sent an email once about attending his group meeting and he just deleted it because it's from someone who isn't in his group and he doesn't know who I am.
And for them, there's always something more important than meeting a student, especially an undergrad one.
Sure. But I've also seen other things, like they are the adviser for a program and you need to meet with them in order to register for classes... the only way to arrange it is by contacting them via e-mail... and they don't respond.
It's systemic at this point...
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My acquaintances usually ignore me on MSN, SKYPE, ETC, so I question if their chat clients are malfunctioning. Ive yet to find out
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were people more reachable before the age of email?
but yeah, my experience is that people have never been consistently and reliably reachable. so i just set my standards low and not get disappointed.
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Wow that would really bug me big time. I've been lucky so far at my school, and also business outside of it.
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I've thought about this kind of thing a lot. it's actually inexcusable. (I wanted to be humble likr micronesia... But maybe not today :D ) what's the point of having all of this if you don't answer? it creates a massive breakdown.
What's really strange and terrible is that if you do the level zero response and say nothing as well, then the whole thing breaks down like a mentioned. But if you ask again, you get labelled as the creep or needy; whatever these people decide.
What makes people do this? I really don't get it.
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I know. I swear I've emailed a teacher about a grad requirement for high school, I've called like 5 times and emailed like 10 times in the last month.
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EPT
