"f/u"

yesterday, i got "f-ed" by an english-challenged colleague. here's what happened.

an issue cropped up and i had to act on it yesterday. usually such issues would have been closed by my staff but as he was on leave, i decided to task it to this female colleague who's covering him. as she's based at another location, i decided to text her the request. she responded very quickly and asked me if there's anything else that she need to f/u! thing was, the way she worded the response sounded like she was scolding me. and when i first glanced at her reply, i didn't know how to respond. emotionally, i wanted to call her and give her a piece of my mind, but objectively, i knew about her challenge with the english language and decided to read, double read and triple read her reply before reacting. after that, i composed a reply to advise her that what she typed could be misinterpreted as "fuck you". and to be sure i did not come across as angry or emotional, i asked my colleague who was seated next to me to take a look at my response. when my colleague saw the conversation thread... she was stunt too. she simply stared at the message with her mouth wide opened. and she literally went "oh-my-gawd!" before she burst out laughing.

this incident reminded me of another incident that happened almost exactly a year ago. what happened was that last year, i send her (this same colleague) a screenshot of my leave projection that had been wrongly computed. in that email, i requested her assistance to correct the error. next thing i knew, i received an email from her. she had forwarded my mail to another colleague and had copied the mail to me. in that mail, it said "take a look, is he telling the truth". within 5 minutes, she send a second mail to me asking me to ignore that email. i took offence with the mail naturally. the content suggested i was lying. so i went up to her and told her nicely that if she thought i was lying, she should have just clarified with me. she looked surprised and replied that she actually wanted to ask the colleague to check if she had keyed in a wrong formula for the leave computation and to check if the mistake had affected other staff. i was amazed at the disparity of the mail content vs her explanation. nonetheless, i gave her the benefit of doubt and turned that incident into an english lesson for her. 

now i do want to add that this colleague of mine is a nice person. her strength, as mentioned, has never been in languages, in particular, english. and to make matters worst, she has the tendency to want to sound authoritative. this certainly did not go down well with many people and most of the time, she ended up stepping on people's toes without realising it. it didn't help for that fact that she's a junior staff...

so... yeah... i was verbally "fucked" by my colleague yesterday. although that was not the intent. but as in all communications, whats important is to be understood. and in this case, it was not. almost. i really don't know how else i can help her.