To Sir (with no love)
I work as a technical support agent for a software company. This morning, I was forwarded an email from our main support email address. It was addressed from the customer: "Dear Sir".
I thought about forwarding the message back to him unanswered. My employer would not likely appreciate that very much, so I helped him without mentioning his faux pas. I do wonder if his interaction with me will affect the way he addresses his next email to tech support.
There is no direct way to correct this behavior - People in positions like mine are paid to assist the customer, not correct social injustice. Any gentle reminder to the customer that women work here too could be construed as giving bad customer service. To not be fearful of losing my job, I would need to clear it with my employer first, which would likely cause a big hoo-ha and waste valuable time I don't have.
In what cases should women point out faulty assumptions about gender, and in what cases should we just let it go? It seems that always letting things go would get us nowhere, and always pointing out the mistakes of others just proves that we are the sensitive beings that a lot of men already think we are.
I thought about forwarding the message back to him unanswered. My employer would not likely appreciate that very much, so I helped him without mentioning his faux pas. I do wonder if his interaction with me will affect the way he addresses his next email to tech support.
There is no direct way to correct this behavior - People in positions like mine are paid to assist the customer, not correct social injustice. Any gentle reminder to the customer that women work here too could be construed as giving bad customer service. To not be fearful of losing my job, I would need to clear it with my employer first, which would likely cause a big hoo-ha and waste valuable time I don't have.
In what cases should women point out faulty assumptions about gender, and in what cases should we just let it go? It seems that always letting things go would get us nowhere, and always pointing out the mistakes of others just proves that we are the sensitive beings that a lot of men already think we are.
posted by Amanda Shankle-Knowlton | 9:23 AM
1 Comments:
This happened to me a few days ago. I responded to the question and then added, "I am not a sir" at the bottom of the email.
To be fair my name is more likely to be a male name in some cultures but it was still kind of annoying. And I did think of Captain Jane Way being referred to as "sir" by her crew, and Elizabeth I saying that she had the heart and stomach of a king.
And of course correcting a coworker is not the same as correcting a customer... my favored passive aggressive approach (used when people misspell my name) is to sign my name correctly and position the signature right above their incorrect greeting in the hopes that they will catch on. Sometimes it works, sometimes not....
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