To: My Pet, My Protege; My Pal; My Chum; My Irritant; My
Nemesis; My Irrelevant;
CC: My Boss; My Boss' Peer; My Future Boss; My Team; Some Else's
Team; Annoyances and Barnacles;
(An author who adds recipients one by one from the contact list generally yields a reversed ordering, with their precious on the right, and their hobbit on the left)
The director of IT just sent out the new Synergizing, Leveraging, And Monetizing strategy paper. As a principal resource in the new initiative, you find yourself a bit unnerved that they included you last in the list of To: recipients.
The outrage!
Their pet employees and sycophants lead the list, followed by the corporate zombies jerkily stumbling towards the inevitable in the next restructuring.
Your email address is bringing up the rear.
The CC: line has the same ordering, though in that case it's the parties not directly involved in the matter discussed.
Was it purely an oversight, or was it an intentional declaration about your standing?
"Don't read too much into it!" most people will answer. "Don't be paranoid!"
And those people would often be right: Many times people reuse old To: lists, or they're technical fumblers barely managing to pull addresses from the contact lists, adding them as they come across them in the sorted list and then reevaluating the line to figure out who's missing. They might be intentionally randomizing recipient lists (which is a tactic I generally use to avoid recipient lists conveying more than I explicitly intend). Maybe they intentionally alphabetize.
That isn't always the case, though, and there are often very real, albeit subtle and generally passive-aggressive, communications when people are given the opportunity to "order" or prioritize other people, particularly their coworkers.
Even when it's subconscious, there is still meaning in the order with which participants came to mind. Maybe they're consciously trying to avoid sending a certain message, for instance placing their office romance last on the recipient list.
It's similar to the choice of seating for a wedding -- hardly an accidental venture, no matter how much your blushing-bride cousin tries to convince you that you're in the nose-bleed section by purely random chance.
Today is the beginning of the loose-leaf collections in my neighborhood. It's a time when squadrons of vacuum trucks go grumbling down the streets, tentacle-like leaf sucking attachment probing about, clearing the curbs and roadside of tree litter.
It's a wonderful service by a fabulous city.
To leverage this service, everyone rakes their lawn, pushing piles of leaves up to the curb to get sucked away, carried off to some unseen composting facility.
I went out to rake -- of course at the last possible moment -- to discover that my neighbor, who I share an open grass border with, had just raked. But instead of raking to the clear but unmarked border between the houses, they pulled back and left an extra foot or so, apparently leaving it for me to rake.
Perhaps they're conceding an extra foot of the land to me? In this way I'm a victorious land conqueror!
Perhaps instead they're being jerks, intentionally leaving some extra work for me, maybe as some sort of jab for an unknown slight.
Maybe the lazy son did it and quite simply tried to trim off a little bit of work.
There is information to be read, although it shrouded in a lot of misinformation and misreading, as is often the case.
I would end with "keep an eye out for these non-direct communications, primarily ensuring that you aren't unintentionally projecting them because people are paying attention", yet most people are already very perceptive to these sorts of subtle hints: Human communication is vastly more involved and complex than simply the words that are spoken or written. Instead this is simply a bit of a thought piece as I ponder the many messages that we convey and receive every day.