With a flushed face and just a little steam escaping from her ears, my colleague strode towards me. ‘Have you got the hump with me?’ she screeched.
Baffled, I glanced sideways to check if there was someone else she could be speaking to. We’d hardly seen each other that week, and had only exchanged brief emails about a forthcoming event.
But there was no one there. ‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘You didn’t put a kiss on the end of your email!’ she blustered, outraged by my rudeness and genuinely more than slightly upset. ‘So, have you got the HUMP with me?’
I should have known. It’s not the first time I’ve been caught neglecting the basic rule of 21st Century office politics: send kisses with everything, even to people you barely know and wouldn’t be caught dead kissing in real life.
I find the whole thing unnecessarily stressful. Here’s a thought – how about an amnesty? We all forgo (virtual) kisses for a month… and we all learn to use full stops properly while we’re at it.
Over the years I’ve worked myself into quite a state over the whole affair. Embarrassed by my own lack of kissiness, but unwilling to capitulate, I have fallen into the ‘end with an emoji’ trap whereby any message that could fall prey to the ‘x’ gets terminated with a yellow smiley face – just so as not to offend.
I forgot to put an ‘x’ at the end of a message to my husband last month and he came home with a bunch of flowers, fearing he was in the dog house. And my oldest friend admitted she perceived me as ‘rude’ when I omitted an ‘x’ from a few flippant exchanges.
Full stops are seen as abrupt and offensive – the punctuation equivalent of a sneer or upturned nose.
If you fail to punctuate a text message with at least one ‘x’, you are a pariah who fails to acknowledge the unspoken rules of civility. If you forget to insert one when signing off on an email, you might as well have handed the contract to the competition.
In the media industry, you can’t go an hour without 17 emails ending with an ‘x’ landing in your inbox. The subjects are bland, the requests inane, often the writer is a total stranger, yet they’re all signed off with a gesture of affection reserved only for those I’m willing to share spit with.
If somebody puts a kiss at the end of their first email, you are likely to respond with one. If you later omit the kiss, they may worry that there is a sinister reason
Why do we do it? Behavioural psychologist Jo Hemmings says the trend is down to a combination of etiquette, desire to please, and habit.
‘We tend to respond to people in the way they approach us – it feels polite and endears us to them, and them to us,’ she explains. ‘It establishes a bond early on in a relationship, be it personal or professional.
‘If somebody puts a kiss at the end of their first email, you are likely to respond with one. If you later omit the kiss, they may worry that there is a sinister reason, rather than just assuming you were in a rush.’
I waste time daily wondering how many kisses to use and when. It’s time consuming, confusing, and a drain on my emotions.
And while this conundrum continues to consume me, and amuse me, when it comes to personal relationships in the workplace it can become very problematic. Send a kiss to the wrong person and you could be accused of inappropriate advances, or simply be seen as a bit ditsy – not the sort of impression one wants to create when courting a new client.
The truth is, I just don’t want to send an empty expression of affection to someone I hardly know every time we interact. We don’t all go around kissing each other in real life, so why do it in typeface?
I’d rather save kisses for when I mean it. For ending an affectionate note, for following my name in a card to someone I care about, or for expressing actual emotion when discussing something serious. Not for ending an email about copywriting a company’s website.
My cross co-worker, by the way, was pacified by my lengthy explanation of why I just don’t ‘do’ kisses.
‘It is a bit silly,’ she conceded, before spontaneously throwing her arms around me in a big, reassuring hug.
Over-zealous and unwanted physical gestures in public places? Don’t get me started…
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source https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/27/kisses-at-the-end-of-texts-are-an-unnecessary-stress-and-need-to-be-banished-10971190/
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