about impossible standards

She was added to an email thread that began 24 hours ago, and she jumps into the shit show. Her favorite thing to do. She wants to be involved. She likes to be in the fray. 

She pounds out a long email that tries to get at the heart of the issue. She wants to know what is happening. What is happening!? More importantly, How did this happen?! 

Her initial dive into the breach is executed with a lot of force. Exclamation points. Italics. Maybe even underlining.

Punctuation and formatting choices nobody in their right mind, in most situations, would make. You might say the tone is—hysterical.

But it gets a response. She’s involved. And now she has more context, more background information. But the information isn’t good!

She needs to set people straight. Here are the rules, and here is how it should be done. More importantly, here is how you all deviated from The Right Way To Do This.

It takes a few of these kinds of emails—plus some separate emails she fires off to some other people—but she gets through.

Okay, they say. You are involved now. You are a part of this. Help us out, they say. Make this right.

Hold on now. It isn’t her problem. And she says so. If this is how they do things, and it works for them, that’s fine. Just let her know what’s what from the get-go. Just copy her.

They are confused now. They thought she wanted to be involved in this thing. They thought she needed to be involved. There has to be a process here.

Not exactly, she says. She has guidance to offer. A perspective. A wealth of experience to draw from, to impart. And that is what is happening now. Not some other thing.

That’s what this whole thing was about.

But—it’s her obligation to point out now that something else is wrong with all this, with what they are doing, with how they are going about it. There is a whole other side to this thing. Another box they need to check. Have they checked it? She doubts it.

Emergency. Or hysteria. Email traffic dies down. Everyone is ready to go about the business of finishing this thing and go their separate ways.

Now that all the excitement is over with.

Note: Was thinking of a Raymond Caver style.