Do you ever have those dilemmas in life when you have to go against something you really believe in, just to keep the universe balanced? I have this problem with full stops on bullet points.

I accept that grammatically, either way is acceptable, but I just don’t think it’s right.

Having said that, I was recently re-reading one of my blog posts which I had published in a hurry and I realised that I had unknowingly finished two bullet points with full stops and one with an exclamation mark. After hyperventilating for a short moment, I pulled myself together long enough to deal with it.

In fairness to myself, I had used the full stop when adding a final word or two to the point. For example:

- Pugs are awesome. Fact.

Totally necessary. But by using two full stops and one exclamation point, I had unintentionally thrown my entire post off balance.

There was only one solution – go back through and add a full stop to every bullet point… all the while accepting that this would result in me not sleeping that night.

I started thinking about what other totally minor things have threatened to tip me over the edge in recent months and fairly quickly realised that I might actually be insane. But hey, who is judging? These are just a few:

USING CAPITALS FOR A HEADING OR IN AN EMAIL

I’m not even joking, people actually do this. In reports, people like to use capitals all over the shop and it has, on occasion, very nearly killed me. If you need a heading, there’s this wonderful thing called bold which is designed for adding emphasis without screaming.

Excessive capitalising in email is particularly unpleasant at work when customers, or people associated with customers think they’ll get a better response from me by CAPITALISING all the AGRESSIVE words in their EMAIL… well, guess what? When I read the third misspelt and capitalised word you included, I lost all interest in helping you in any way. Instead, I have made it my mission to ruin your life!

If you’re reading this and you have a tendency to capitalise unnecessarily, please do not ever make me aware of this. It won’t go well. Capital letters should be reserved for the occasional emphasis of a single word and nothing else. For example -Pugs are AWESOME.

txt spk n emails (Text speak in emails)

Last year, I received the following one-line email from our IT guy at work:

“ok np.. ‘only’ looks a bit stupid in the comparison popup though imo”

After staring blankly at my screen for a good twenty seconds, I called a colleague into my office and said ‘I think IT Guy might be having a seizure!’

Apparently I’m just not down with the lingo. Mucho awkwardo.

I am the first to accept that I overuse the acronyms OMG and WTF and maybe it’s a double standard, but under no circumstances should lol, lmfao, np, imo, fml, ffs, ftw or ttfn be used in an email. It takes me more time to Google what it means that it would take you to just write in English!

And don’t even get me started on ‘totes’!

Using the space bar instead of tab

If you reeeeaaallly want to piss me off, put together a nicely aligned and spaced document which has been formatted without using the tab button. Go on,  do it. I dare you…

I guarantee I will squeal, hyperventilate and not speak to you for at least two hours.

Even better, put the header content on the main page, the page number at the top centre and don’t bother with columns, just split all the text into two and put spaces between everything…. EVERYWHERE*!

Times New Roman

Do I need to elaborate? Why does this font still exist?!?

So now you’re starting to grasp how challenging my life is and you’re no doubt wondering how I cope…

I take a deep breath, open a new window in Google Chrome and search Google Images using two magical words ‘Awesome Pug’…

And just for you, my lovely blog readers, I am letting you into my world for a moment. This is the wall above my work desk, I call it The Wall of Pug Inspiration**!

*Please note totally appropriate use of capital letters

** Yes, that is Jacob on the top left. Yes, he has a speech bubble saying ‘I love you… see you tonight!’ but just hold your judgement, I am 100% Team Edward!