Thanks for defending my right to say stupid things.

No, you. Thanks

Thinking about it, there may be something to this. Up until a few years ago, all my more work correspondence was incredibly sterile and formal. Not a single exclamation point in sight. Nowadays, my communication is much more cheerful. Perhaps because I’ve become desensitized to all the energy from those damn kids, whenever I run into an old-guard style communicator I interpret is as insincere.

This. It’s the presumption of a done/deal with no comment period. If it’s coming from C-Suite, then yeah, I’m their whipping boy unless they are telling me to do something extremely stupid in an area where I am the subject matter expert (then I just get it in writing that this is a terrible idea that I advised against and do it anyways because they own me). However, what I’m referring to are the individuals that have no grounds to assume they can issue me any sort of directive.

Yeah, my own fault for not including the proper details. If you’re interested, you might find some clarity in this response.

I don’t know that this will have any impact on your opinion, but here’s a reply that provides the context I should have included in my original post.

Yeah, it’s my own fault for not providing enough context. You are 100% on the ball that this is not regarding an email sign-off. Allow me to remedy the lack of appropriate context.

I’m the IT person at my org. The latest incident that sparked this post was a member of our sales team shooting me a message of, “Hey, send me a new pair of AirPods. Thanks.” There’s a couple of things wrong with approaching me that way:

1. Any request, especially hardware requests, need to be submitted as a ticket so that there’s a paper trail. It’s a well established procedure. If you scroll back in our message history, it is almost exclusively them attempting to bypass the ticketing system and me responding to the tune of, “Hey! Happy to help. Shoot me a ticket at https://link-to-our-ticket-system.com and I will assist you as soon as I can!”
2. Nearly anything that comes to my desk, that isn’t a technical issue, is a request that needs to be put through the review process, and approved or denied based upon its merit.

Interactions along that line aren’t unique, or tied to any specific individual. It’s typically a percentage of any employee pool I have ever been a part of. It’s the presumption of a done deal that grinds my gears, but I don’t have the perspective to guess at their thought process so I was curious if I was missing something. Anyways, thank you for your thoughtful response. It is greatly appreciated.