I’m angry, a raging angry young technocrat.

Raging against the corporate machine! RAAAARGH!

The stupidity, oh the stupidity!

My company’s embarked on a rebranding strategy. New logo colours, new taglines, new business cards (I guess I’ll be throwing out the 480 I haven’t used yet), new templates, new clothes…

What has made me an Angry Young Woman is the damned email footer they’re making us attach to all our emails.

Some marketing genius, in his or her infinite wisdom, has decided that we all need HTML footers. Let me tell you about this footer.

• It’s a 14 KB HTML file someone has put together in Microsoft Word.
• It’s eight, count ’em, eight lines long.
• There are three sizes of fonts, two colours and inconsistent use of capitalisation.
• It’s a HTML footer, when all our emails are sent out to clients and regulators as Lotus Notes files or plain text.
• The signature contains a little picture of a tree. Problem? The tree is the letter ‘P’ from the Microsoft Webdings font set. Whenever our snazzy emails land on a computer in plain text or if for some crazy reason Webdings isn’t installed (are there people that backward in the world?), or if the signature is viewed in any non-IE browser, then our emails will announce, ‘P Please consider the environment before printing’. Oh, the shame!
• When the signature is invariably converted to plain text, the lines are over 72 characters long. In many mail applications, the signature will be wrapped and the whole thing balloons to ten lines or more.

I was so aghast by this monstrosity that I wrote a message to the marketing manager. She said, “I am aware of these issues, however it’s a corporate template. I’ll let you know if they decide to change it.” Translation: Not my problem.

It is your problem! It’s all our problem! I am ashamed to send emails that look like this.

Who can I talk to? Who in the marketing department will be able to understand these (not really all that) technical issues? At the moment, I feel like I am talking to stubborn children.

A-wah!