Dear Mr. Meanspirited English Professor:

I know the emotional impact of seeing the website I designed with your bush-league looking research project as one of the 200 links included alongside many more professional-looking sites must have been profound. I know that you must have felt a sinking feeling when you saw that the link I included to your project was a crummy but still-functioning one from 2003, and it must have smarted when you Googled your own project and saw that old page still comes up first, which is why I even included it.

I can even understand, at that point, why you would want to pick over the entire site I designed, page after page, and compile a list of snivelingly trivial complaints which you could later use to justify arguing to my boss that the site--and by extension my being paid to create it--is "a waste of scarce resources." Some of those complaints, sir, I must admit are reasonable and I will probably work to remedy those problems.

But then--and I mean this in the most deferential of ways--you lost it, buddy. Saying that doing a good job on the site "would require someone with patience and subject expertise, neither of which is possessed by the person who designed this" is just downright frothing at the mouth. Calling my work "slipshod and amateurish" and suggesting I be replaced on the project immediately would sting if you were a webmaster OR if the work in question was, say, a dissertation on Chaucer. But you're an English prof and I'm the person they paid four hours a week to design something simple. Your emotional outburst, therefore, is a bit puzzling and a little embarrassing. For you.

Not that you intended for me to see it. For that I blame my boss. Which is another story, an even sadder one since I wasn't given a chance to defend myself from your screedy email attack. So you're not entirely at fault here for having lost control and sent a ridiculous, disproportionately angry note to someone about something relatively minor. You figured (or, to give you perhaps undeserved credit, hoped) the person you sent it to would have the decency not to forward it.

But said decency was absent here. So I have read it and I'll just wrap up here by asking: Did you really think anyone would miss the eensy weensy sentence in your email about the icky link to your own research project? Even my boss caught it and admitted it was probably what prompted you to write. Unfortunately for me, my job is now at risk because I failed to provide a more updated link to your work which is, presumably, hiding somewhere on the Net? Because a half hour of my amateurish, slipshod searching couldn't find it.

Ever Yours,
Mariya Strauss