There’s a story circulating on Reddit, and it’s striking a nerve for good reason. The Reddit user had just lost their mum. Grief is hard enough as it is, but doing it while continuing to show up to work every day makes it even harder. But it's not just the loss itself; what pushed their situation from painful to almost unbearable was their boss’ reaction to it.
He told the employee to get over it. He said their mother's death was creating more work for him.
The employee couldn’t leave. They had bills to pay and were already quietly looking for a better role elsewhere. But they weren’t going to keep sending out warmth they no longer felt. So they came up with a way to express their feelings without saying a word, without lodging a complaint or initiating a confrontation they couldn’t afford.
The employee stopped using exclamation points in their emails to the boss.
The punctuation protest that broke a boss
That is almost absurdly small and that’s exactly the point.
“I always start emails with a positive first sentence. Something like a simple 'Good morning!' or 'I hope you're having a nice day!' I still do this on emails to my boss, but I have omitted exclamation points entirely,” the employee wrote. The post, shared around a year ago, has garnered over 30,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments.
They had been working for the company for over ten years. Anyone who worked closely with them knew the tone had changed, and the boss knew right away. Then he started to reply in a panic, frantically, loading up his own emails with exclamation marks at a frantic rate, which he’d never done before. The employee could see it was eating him up.
What the employee was doing was not unprofessional. They hadn't raised their voice, missed a deadline or written one unprofessional word. They had just stopped padding her communication with performative cheer, and that was enough to somehow break him.
