#and people realize tattoos actually have no correlation to someone's professional ability

[kittyoverlord]

I work with attorneys who have hand tattoos. It's really not a big deal.

once when I was at my dad’s workplace, he and I were speaking to his coworker who had a butterfly tattoo. and as soon as she was out of earshot, he said “whenever I see people with tattoos, I feel that their parents have failed them.” and me, being the child of this person, who already had multiple tattoos hidden under clothing, was like 😬

[donnerpartyofone]

working for a giant corporation taught me some really crazy things about myself and others. for instance, i think that if you grow up as like a responsible little goody two shoes like myself, you develop this delusion that people in high-powered jobs are mature and intelligent in proportion to how far up the ladder they are, because how else could they possibly have become the boss of everybody? in reality there is absolutely no such correlation between mental and social ability, and what you get to do, and actually i think that most people in a position of authority get there by being so thin-skinned and intolerable when they’re not satisfied that people just give them stuff to get them to shut up. but i digress. what i’m really thinking about is the shocking realization that older, more experienced, more “qualified” people (or just as bad, people who appear to be on exactly the same level as you) don’t read. i mean, they just will never read an entire email. i used to write these emails that included every single piece of information the person might need to know about whatever the subject was; not that they were pages long, but they’d introduce the topic, ask my main 2-3 questions, and include whatever the person might need to know in order to answer me, if there was anything extra that they shouldn’t know already. then i started to realize that no matter what i did to try to finish the conversation in as few emails as possible, the person would like, read the first line, respond only to that in a confusing incomplete way, and then later get mad because i “never told them” all the stuff i explained in that first message. so, i had to learn to start dumbing down everything i wrote until it was like something i would send to a child, in the simplest terms possible and never with more than one piece of information OR one question at a time. i found it pretty disturbing to have to do this, just like i found it disturbing that in this day and age you really HAVE to use stupid little smiley face emoji in a professional environment or else no one is capable of figuring out if you’re like furiously screaming at them or not. even though some people are legitimately so busy and overwhelmed that you have to spoonfeed them information for both your sakes, these experiences can go a long way toward making you feel like everyone you work for is a fucking idiot and they shouldn’t be allowed to push you around and condescend to you if they can’t even fucking read as well as you apparently do.

anyway this isn’t exactly the same thing AT ALL but last week i sent a tattoo proposal to this person who is a really successful, sophisticated artist. it’s not my first time at the rodeo, or even at that specific shop, so i bulleted the stuff that has to go into every proposal, and added whatever extra description i thought was necessary. admittedly there was a bunch of that, because what i wanted them to do was a little complex, like i want an existing image but in a different style, and i wanted to be as clear as possible about that. the other unusual thing i did was to send a link to my reference images (all in one place after the jump), instead of attaching them--part of what i sent was a video showing the available space on my arm (i needed to turn my arm over to show the whole spot), and i couldn’t email it, so this seemed like an ok solution. this is starting to sound like a lot but it really wasn’t, it was like, read a half-page email with clear bullet points and then follow a link. about a week passed (that part is normal), and then i noticed that they sent me a DM over instagram, from a blank account i guess they keep for this purpose. that was weird since we’d never interacted over there, and also since they didn’t respond to my email; why would this be easier? so then i look, and there’s no message, they just forwarded me their booking faq--which outlines exactly what i did. i don’t know what they think i didn’t send already--i’m guessing they didn’t like or didn’t notice the photo link but i can’t be sure because they didn’t say anything--but it was all in my email. suddenly i found myself back in that office mentality. do i

a) resend everything in a different format, to try to figure out what email style works best for them? understanding that it’s always possible they won’t get it the second time either, for some reason? or b) reply that i already DID read the faq and i sent them exactly what it asked for, so they should just look at my email again, in a tone that magically doesn’t make me sound mad or rude?

OR, let’s say i don’t want to do this with them anymore because i’m worried about letting someone modify my body when we’re already struggling to communicate. like to be honest it bothered me that they didn’t type anything, even like “your message is missing stuff, read the faq and try again”, and/or “i’m sending my faq over instagram so check your DMs.” also they sent the faq as photos over DM so they expire; i thought to take screenshots, but if i hadn’t, i’d be fucked. so, i think now i have to figure out how to terminate this. do i

1) reply to the DMs, or to my email which i guess they got even though they switched channels on me, and make a formal declaration that i’m not going to pursue this with them so there’s no further confusion, or 2) just ghost, because who really cares, and they’re probably really busy anyway, which would explain everything that happened/didn’t happen.

i wish i didn’t agonize over stuff like this but that’s just my deal. this is slightly like when i realized that now some professionals only write in this infantile internet speak, which has the dual effect of making me feel strangely uncool even if they’re older and dorkier than me, and also like i’m just not sure if they’re actually reading and understanding what i tell them because their responses are in like baby talk. i think it’s becoming obvious that the answer is 2 just forget all about this, i already thought of someone else for this project anyway and it’s too anxious-making for me to figure out someone’s love language or whatever just so i can tailor all my messages to them. probably a lot of people would just drop it without even worrying about it. i just wish i gave less of a shit about things in general.