Quickies have their place, and they can be a-okay, too. Of course by their very nature, quickies usually leave somebody hanging. In the bedroom, well that’s between you and your mate.

But in business, oh…that’s not good even once.

Since 1992 I’ve been writing for businesses. With the advent of MailChimp and Constant Contact and their like, it has become very easy to make quick reach-outs to many customers all at once.

For all his official sales campaigns, nothing goes out before I edit the hell out of it for one of my clients.

But he often gets the idea that he has a small message, around social goings on and what not, that he just wants to do by way of a friendly missive, and so poof! in my Inbox comes an email.

Well, after seeing several of these over a period of about a year — always with misspellings or misleading punctuation — when I got the last one I sent him an email that said,

“What the hell? Am I not good enough to do your editing anymore?”

His quick(ie) reply back was the excuse that it didn’t matter because “it was a quickie and not about sales.” You don’t say quickie to a woman too often because…well, you know why…and this woman saw how his quickie messaging made him (and me because people know I do his editing) look very bad.

This quickie of his had five sentences, none of which didn’t have a mistake in it. From a first word in a sentence not capitalized to a missing comma that completely changed the meaning, he went on to use a word that sounds like but wasn’t the one he meant, a misspelled word, and…to top it all off…his own company name misspelled.

Five sentences. Five mistakes.

Quickie. Quickie, quickie, quickie…quickie.

Words matter, folks. Customers don’t like to be left hanging so…

Beware the siren call of the Quickie.