Rant mode engaged. I’m a state pencil pusher. I administer benefits for elected officials, their staff, with regular administrative employees. I’m 100% convinced that as a whole, Americans are functionally illiterate. I will spend 30 minutes to an hour crafting an organized email with TL;DR bullet points at the end to have people call me to ask me a question that said email already answered. Bro/sis, did you even attempt to read the words on the page? It’s not an age thing, or an education thing either. It’s old people and young people. It’s elected officials, people with PhDs, masters, and JDs, along with highschool and college graduates. It’s gotten to the point that I will make people pull up the email I sent out to read along while I point out where in the text their questions were already answered. I’m one person doing the work of 3, and god damn I hate doing the same task over and over because people can’t be bothered to fucking read.
I moved to a small town where everybody knows everybody else and a lot of my friends have lived here for decades, if not their entire lives. I learned to stop asking for directions from them. They’ll all give me what they consider to be the simplest and most helpful way to get there, but it’s usually along the lines of “It’s next to where the old Eckerd’s store used to be, behind the Wallace Church parking lot”. What seems clear and obvious and simple to them means fuck all to me and anybody that hasn’t lived here since the 1980s.
One tool that helps me a lot, and let me just say I used to work in retail customer service, is to have some grace and give people the benefit of the doubt. There’s a good chance at least some of these people are also doing the job of 3 or more people as well, dealing with dozens and dozens of emails streaming in all day, and also lots going on in their lives in general. Yes, you put a lot of effort into that email, and maybe you’re the local giving perfectly succinct directions to an outsider.