From the "prohibited activities" section of the TOS:

"disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site"

A useful feature of email is the receiver reads and responds to it on their schedule as opposed to being constantly interrupted.

I once worked for a company where established etiquette was to use instant messaging (which tends to rudely interrupt the receiver, implying that whatever the sender's issue is has more importance that what the receiver is doing) be reserved for instances where you were blocked and your work could not proceed without the immediate help of the receiver.

If this was not the case, an email was considered more appropriate so the receiver could respond during a normal break in their work when they would read their email.

I _do_ miss this consideration at my most recent job where I am obliged to keep both Slack and Hangouts up at all times so that I can be constantly interrupted by (often trivial) queries that jar me off whatever I am trying to work on.

I (female) have been in the software industry since the 80's. My first job was with a small company that made custom printer interface cards. I constituted the entire tech support and software maintenance department (as I said, small company!).

I would sometimes get calls from customers having problems who would simply not accept what I was telling them. In cases like these I would go down the hall to a male coworker's office and tell him that I had a customer that "needed a deeper voice". He (manager - no technical knowledge) would take the call with me on the extension at the back of the room mouthing the answers to the customer's questions which he would then speak into the phone. The customer would then be quite satisfied with the answers and we would have a good laugh.

I suspect that things have improved some since then but still run into people who seem to "need a deeper voice".

IMO the straw went downhill not due to a change in its own design but due to a change in the design of the paper wrapper which has become too tight to provide any fun. I long for a return of straw wrappers that are loose enough to remove one end and shoot it across the room or scrunch it up to make a caterpillar that would "grow" when drops of liquid were dropped on them. Ah, the good old days!

I have had 2 experiences with telecommuting - one not so successful, and one that is working out fine. In my first attempt I was one of 2 remote telecommuters in an organization where all other employees worked in the same office. There was a lot of distrust amongst the office crowd of those of us who were remote because telecommuting was not part of the culture. In my current postion (been here 2 years), the organization is much more distributed and telecommuting is an accepted aspect of the culture, so it works out much better. My work is project oriented, and I make an effort to communicate with others in my org _a_lot_, primarily via email. A plus I might mention wrt telecommuting is that it works well when you are the primary caretaker of school aged children that require a lot of after school driving and involvment. You can generally work your schedule to free up time as needed, and don't have to burn that 1-2 hours you may have spent in a car driving to/from work.