So that's what you do!

I was eating dinner last night, a somewhat dissapointing carne asada burrito, when I received an email from a VIP. I mean this person's email signature has so many acronyms, abbreviations and titles, that it wraps across the entire bottom of every email he sends out. Obviously he is important, and he has to show us how important he is. I could go on and on about that, but I won't.

So this person is a Senior VP of Marketing, Technical Support and Product Development. Working with this individual, it has been extremely hard to understand what he does. He is out of the office, alot. He rolls in late, every day. Whenever you request something from him, he asks dozens of questions, to the point where a person will just give up and move on, doing it themselves or dropping it completely. The only time I have seen him follow thru with something is when he is cornered by someone with an equal or bigger title than his. And from everything I have seen, he will not hesitate to throw anyone under the bus to save his ass. A real nice guy. A marketing guy. A salesman.

So this guy has been on my ass for months about the signature lines on my team's email. He has continually pushed for me to have my people change to a generic signature, with no flair or flavor. I agreed, to a point, that there should be consistency and accuracy, but that outside of anything crazy, a little personalization would not harm anything. And besides, no one but him was complaining. Our company was bought up by a larger company. They have a fairly complex signature template, and this Marketing guy was kind enough to provide it to the company. We all implemented it, but a lot of us tweaked it a bit to make it look "tight." Nothing crazy. A seperation line between the body of the email and the signature. Bolded name and a font and color change on the "please recycle" line. All in all, the signature looks the same when printed out on paper. The difference would and is really imperceptible to pretty much anyone.

So, last night I received this: I noticed that your signature line is different from the template provided by (company name). This is a corporate standard. You should remove the bold and the line above your signature, standardize the font size and color. We need to make sure that others don't think it's ok to deviate, I'm sure you understand. Let me know if any questions.

A senior VP of a whole slew of departments has become the email signature police! Nothing else on this guy's plate was more important to deal with. Not the pricing issues we have been asking for his group to clear up. Not the contracts that we are still dealing with. Not the outdated and incorrect catalog. Or the fact that some of our mainline products are acting up, and he is in charge of Technical Services. None of that was important for him to deal with. He had to email me at 7pm, to let me know that I was not compliant with his template. Nevermind that he is not my boss, that people at or above his level have similar signature lines like mine. No. None of that was a factor for him last night. He put on his badge and made ready to round up all us "offenders." It was one of those moments that I could just not shake. I thought about it for the rest of the evening. I was thinking about it when I woke up. On the drive in, I could only think about how ridiculous this request was. I don't understand. I have a lot of questions. Not about email signatures of course. To me, this was one of those surreal moments, where again, you are reminded that people are getting paid obscene amounts of money to saunter around policing email signatures. Not to make this political, but I really hope that the checks and balances that Obama is putting into place will prevent this same kind of behavior at the government level. After all, if there ever was a place where you could imagine an email signature cop, it would be in the halls of Congress.