Yesterday morning, I came into the office and one of the first things waiting in my inbox was a rather tersely worded email from a Team Lead or Manager (I forget which… but I’ll refer to him as ‘Coworker B1’ for this case) in another department. In this email, he claimed that the IT department had effectively dropped the ball on completing a request that he’d put in.

I went to that department and talked with one of this person’s peers (Coworker B2) as:

  1. the email’s author doesn’t regularly work in this office AND
  2. I knew that I might not be able to refrain from punching him in the throat had I seen him

I let Coworker B2 know, in no uncertain terms, that he needed to inform B1 that we were not only aware of the situation, but that we had done what we could to rectify it and were awaiting hardware to complete the task. I made a concerted effort to keep my language as office-appropriate as possible, of which I think that I did a rather commendable job – while expressing my displeasure at the tone that the person-in-question had used.  I finished the conversation by saying that if Coworker B1 still had any questions about the way things had been handled that he could come and talk with me and I would explain it to him in detail.

Later in the day, I received a follow-up email from B1. It wasn’t a complete backpedal nor was it a complete apology, but its tone was far less accusational than its predecessor.

This afternoon, IT had another email. This time from Coworker B2. He was asking about the status of a task that he had entered. He made a point of noting: “I’m not accusing you of dropping the ball here.” That amused me. He closed the email with the following:

I thought I’d better explain myself before you sent your hitman, Rob, to pound on me!

That made me smile.