Let’s say you’re walking to your car having just purchased two armfuls worth of groceries. In fact, they’re so full something falls out of the top of one of the bags. You think to yourself that it would be so much easier if that person coming toward you would just kneel down and pick it up for you. So you ask for his help. He’s not interested in helping you, and so walks on.

How would that make you feel?

Now picture yourself at the public library. You’re having trouble finding a book, so you ask the librarian for her help. She briefly glances up to you, pauses, then brings her gaze back down to the paperwork she was tending to.

How would that make you feel? Okay, so let’s switch places.

A co-worker e-mails you for help with a report he’s putting together. His deadline is tomorrow and you have the time to help him, but it’s a nice day and you were thinking of taking the rest of the day off. So what if you don’t get back to him until you return, right?

How would that make him feel?

So maybe you’re justified in taking the day off and maybe you’re not truly obligated to help your co-worker with his report. That’s fine, but is it all right to just ignore the guy? Put yourself in his shoes. Wouldn’t a response saying that you’d love to, but already have plans be better than just shutting down your computer and walking off?

Sadly, I believe this sort of thing happens all too often. Somewhere along the way society has decided it’s rude to ignore someone in person (okay, sometimes that does happen anyway, but work with me), but when someone e-mails you it’s acceptable to let it sit in your inbox indefinitely. Not everything demands an immediate response, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

Now that doesn’t mean I sometimes don’t want to ignore someone because there are times when I’ve exhausted my communication skills and patience. Nor does it mean I’ll answer every e-mail I get that sells me something. There are times when it is acceptable to ignore or deliberately delay your response to some messages.

What I’m suggesting is to consider the Golden Rule when determining your response. In most cases, ignoring somebody’s e-mail is no different than ignoring the person next to you who asks you what time it is.

Acknowledging that someone exists can be just as a powerful as ignoring someone. So the next time you get an e-mail asking for help, treat it as though that person is standing right next to you.

For those of you who have experienced this, you know how easy it is to be misinterpreted in your e-mails. Personally, I take a long time writing and rewriting my e-mails (the majority of them anyway) to make sure I’m not misunderstood or make someone angry with me. But every now and then my efforts may fail.

E-mail, IM, and chatting are all great tools to communicate with others, but the one thing they all lack is emotion. Without emotion we miss part of what is being said, and that can lead to hurt feelings. Sometimes it can escalate to worse things.

It’s because of this lack of emotion, and the easy misinterpretation of someone’s thoughts in written form, that emoticons were created. For those of you who are new to the Web, they’re those little combination of characters that you sometimes see that, if you turn your head sideways, appears to make a little face. So if I type it looks like a person winking at you and smiling. If I type I’m conveying sadness, and >:( means I’m angry.

Elsewhere on this blog you’ll find more graphic representations of emoticons. Like or . They’re all just a way to help me convey my meaning a little better.

Look, we all say things in person that we sometimes wish we wouldn’t have said. The same holds true for e-mailing someone. So the next message you read that makes you angry, consider for a moment if it truly was the intent of the sender to sound that way. Give them the benefit of the doubt. By the same token, whether you’re writing someone just to shoot the breeze, or if you’re responding to someone that has really made you , walk away from it for a little while, and give yourself time to think it over and cool off. #