Inspired by fellow blogs written by liberal arts majors with student loan and credit card debt talking about trading forex and binary options, we've decided to try a new subject today: telling you how to gain respect at your job and in your life!
Now, sure - this blog is written by two engineers and an economist. Since the common feeling in this community seems to be that no one can have fun coding, working CAD programs, and shifting money from hand to hand (until it all disappears) and you should follow your dreams instead - please gloss over that little fact. We're sure your jobs are more fulfilling than ours - but let us use our icy rationalism and lack of a single soul between us to help you get ahead in your dream job.
Just read on, and bookmark his piece! (Also, eat the poor.)
According to Reddit's /r/economics subreddit, this face can get you 463% more respect.
Emoticons
Do you know the number of emoticons you're using? Double it. Are you using none? Start with one per email.
You see, the steely rationalism and formality of plain old, boring words is preventing you from growing into that special flower you have always been told you are. Pictures are truly worth 1,000 words - and if you lack the skills to use programs like Microsoft Excel to create actual business value, the next best thing to do is to create anthropomorphic faces out of ASCII characters. Remember: the best substitute for a picture or graph is a crude representation of a face.
So, take this to heart - you will gain epic amounts of respect from your colleagues (and especially those above you on the Org Chart) by sprinkling your text with a liberal amount of emoticons. Here are some good ones:
🙂 🙂 >:) :'( 🙁 XD 😀 :@ D:< 😉 ಠ_ಠ ~:-\
Emoticons are best used with people who have more experience - in the job or in years. The higher up the org chart someone is, the more important it is that you add a sprinkling of emoticons to your next email.
Proofreading
Don't do it. If you didn't do it in the first draft, it wasn't important anyway.
Slang and Acronyms
Everything we said about emoticons applies doubly to acronyms and slang, especially of digital etymology.
Remember: the key to good communication is clarity and brevity, so you should definitely take it to the logical extreme by using as many slang terms as you possibly can.
This about how much respect you can garner if the next time you want to tell your colleague that you enjoyed his or her presentation, you instead sent a brief email that said: "Luuuuuuved it! <3! LOL!". There is absolutely no ambiguity in that email, and your colleague will be sure to double the amount of respect they have for you.
Acronyms and slang arose in Usenet (for extremely slow modems), but also proved useful for text messages and, recently, space constrained services such as Twitter. If you increase your knowledge of slang and acronyms used by the most cutting edge commenters on Youtube (pro tip: that's where the 14 year-olds who will have the greatest impact on society hang out) you will be prepared for when evil internet companies start charging you per character in your email.
Advanced Tip: for those who already know and practice the above, try to sprinkle internet slang into your day to day communication. There is no better way to have senior folks at your company remember you then to drop a term which forces them to look for a definition on Urban Dictionary when they get back to their desk. Your corporate rise will be meteoric, IMHO!
Punctuation & Grammar
There is no greater way to be ignored than to follow the grammatical rules you learned in elementary school. As soon as you need to send important emails, you should revert to a drooling troglodyte and just invent new grammatical constructs as you go along.
Remember: the internet is full of perfect punctuation and grammar, so if you want to stand out from the trenchant comments and well reasoned think pieces that typical internet users leave in comments and send in emails you need to be unique and make up your own rules. I truly believe that someone who doesn't capitalize the first letter of a sentence and doesn't use periods will stand out in the stuffy crowd that inhabits the internet.
Also, exclamation points. Use them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Aesthetics
First, never use a word like aesthetics - you won't be able to garner any respect on Reddit because users there won't be able to find the definition on imgur. However, we're a dying breed - so let's skate to where the puck is going to be and talk about typefaces and color choice.
Doesn't it annoy you that the only choice you have to make while writing at work is which size of Black Times New Roman to use in your email or presentation? Break out of your cage and see the world! Your presentation will be taken much more seriously if you explore the limits of what typography has to offer mankind. Sure, the Government mandates certain fonts on road signs and documents for ease of readability - but you have no limitation on what you should use while emailing CEOs.
I suggest a light blue background and pink Comic Sans (size 18) for your next email. Once you have practice selecting the perfect aesthetic for your email, you can move on to more advanced strategies such as changing font colors halfway through your email.
Anything Else?
Like we mentioned before, we three are an anachronism. We know what it takes to get ahead, but since we've been told it's impossible to follow your dreams to a STEM career, we aren't the foremost experts on the full richness of experience you can inspire in your audience by following this advice.
With that said, we hope you'll add to our amazing advice and tell us where we're wrong.
And happy April 1st.
If you follow this advice without reading this disclaimer: "Don't do it", you deserve the consequences. So, don't do it.
