This morning, like most mornings, I opened my email to see a bunch of requests for help with various educational technology tools. Half of them I am very happy to answer. Those are the ones in which the sender addresses me by name and makes a polite request. Then there are the ones like this one (embedded below) that lack any kind of greeting or reek of “fix my problem, now!” Those are the ones that I either ignore or reply to with something along the lines of “I’m sorry, I can’t provide remote tech support.”

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This is the type of email that I get from random people every day. No polite greeting, no mention of my name, just “help me with my problem, now.” I like to help people, but if you can’t bother to address me by name, my response is often, ” I’m sorry, I don’t provide remote tech support.” #mannersmatter #manners

A post shared by Richard M. Byrne (@rmbyrne) on Apr 11, 2019 at 7:57am PDT

I’m sharing this partly as a rant, partly as a reminder that I’m a one-man show, and partly as a reminder that manners matter. To that end, here’s a great lesson about email etiquette. The video lesson was produced by a student for inclusion on Next Vista for Learning’s library of educational videos.