1. I sent emails to people at 3 AM because I needed their help with something. The next morning, I was asked to rewrite the email to make it “forwardable.” Whoops. To clarify, nothing I said in the email was shockingly terrible, but I could have written it in a more professional manner.

Lesson: Your judgment at 3 AM might not be the best.

2. I sent the wrong attachment in an email, which included redlined changes that had not been accepted on the “Track Changes” option for over a year. I don’t know how this happened, but I frantically sent three emails about me trying to fix the problem without actually fixing the problem.

Lesson: Make sure you verify that you are sending the correct attachments in documents, and try to solve the problem yourself without giving someone a play-by-play of everything you’re doing.

3. I misread an email and called someone a day early.

Lesson: Read carefully.

4. I sent a poorly worded email (see a trend here?) that said something along the lines of “I will do this if the company can make arrangements for me” and then spent the rest of the evening worrying about how unappreciative and arrogant I sounded. This morning, I sent another email clarifying what I had meant to say. I’m not sure if I should have done this or not.

Lesson: Being over polite is probably being polite enough.

5. Please reread 4.

Lesson: Something like “I would be so grateful if the company could help me with…” would have been much better.

Part 2

What I’ve learned in the last day is that asking for help isn’t the worst thing in the world. I thought I was too good to ask people for help because I could figure out everything on my own.

{T-W-E-L-V-E M-O-R-E D-A-Y-S}