Now, if you're someone's boss and hitting up a subordinate with whom there is known "bad blood" then I get the point about the "emotional cost" of a scenario where you write, close to the end of the business day, "hello", then your subordinate doesn't respond for 10 minutes. Then you go home, or get into a block of meetings that will make you unavailable to continue the convo for several hours.
But if you have that little emotional intelligence, you shouldn't be anyone's boss, and if a mere "hello" from your boss freaks you out, you should probably just quit then and there.
My data point: it enrages everyone I know. And they lose respect for the person who said "hello" and wasted their time.
Probably that’s the thing to solve for, not “hello”, “query” vs “hello, query”.
Everyone I work with feels the same. The “hello” people are the outliers and the rest of the office knows it.
...there must be some psychology student out there to whom this thread is an absolute gold mine for their Ph.D. thesis. ...or maybe a standup comedian.
You cannot control how a recipient receives your message.
My point exactly. Only problem: If A hurts B's feelings, that doesn't automatically mean B has the moral high ground and A is therefore in the wrong.
If B plays the "hurt feelings" card after A has done nothing to give offense other than start a conversation with "hello" in a text chat where they had no way of discerning B's emotional state, then that's the best example I've encountered yet, of a situation where A's hurt feelings clearly seem like A's problem.
In my experience, hello people usually present with the following comorbidities:
- inability to learn and retain new information.
- inability to own their work and take responsibility from end-to-end.
- tendency to push their own work onto other people and become a victim when the other person doesn't do exactly what they want.
Maybe the psychology student you mentioned could look into this phenomenon for their thesis?
I already established that (a) I'm one of those hello people. (b) I'm allowing this conversation to change my behaviour, based on the fact that I simply never had any idea that people could take offence from a "hello". If your definition of "learn" is "coming around to your point of view", that would seem to make me a counterexample to your psychological typology.
But it still rubs me the wrong way to think that this society is leaving the business of "creation of cultural norms" to crybabies. Show me a group that's complaining about being said "hello" to, and I'll show you a group that needs to check their privilege.
Maybe you don't fit that mold and just like to say hello and you are a good coworker without all the bad traits I mentioned. Didn't mean to make this personal... just sharing my observations of the past.
Beginning a text chat with "Hello, I have a few questions about xyz and was wondering if now would be a good time to talk?" is considerate of the other party's time and attention, and it does not cost you anything but seconds to provide this context up front.
Edit: you edited and lengthened your comment.
> The protocol is then something like: "me-to-person-a: hello". wait for 5 minutes. no respone. "me-to-person-b: hello". wait for 5 minutes. no response. "me-to-person-c: hello"
I'm sorry, this is _insane_! That's 10 minutes to send out 3 words of communication, and the people who don't get back to you right away will now be getting back to you later to clarify, further worsening your signal to noise ratio! You could have spent 20 _seconds_ composing the first message with a one sentence synopsis. "Don't worry, no one is dead" or "The factory is on fire" are useful to know up front. You could copy and paste it to the next two people if they don't get back to you.