Ghosting Busting
Friends, I think we’ve got a problem in our modern society and today’s work-a-day world, and it’s high time we do something about it. The evil I speak of is called ghosting. Like any bad habit in today’s culture, this bad behavior began in the social realm of the Internet (specifically, online dating) and has migrated into the mainstream workplace.
You may not know the term “ghosting” but once you know its definition, you’ll understand it completely because it’s probably happened to you…Or God help you, you are or have been a perpetrator a.k.a. a “ghoster.”

Ghosting is the practice of suddenly ending all contact with a person without explanation. It is an incredibly rude thing to do and when you think about it, so unnecessary. All that’s required in most cases is a simple one sentence “kiss off” if you no longer want to engage with someone. Here are a few suggestions to use in lieu of ghosting:
- “Sorry, I can’t help you.”
- “I’m no longer capable or interested in communicating with you.”
- “I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, so don’t contact me again, I’ll contact you.”
- “I just can’t spend any more time (with you, on this, doing this) ’cause I’m dead or dying!”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in the middle of an email conversation with an individual, a colleague, an agency representative, a publisher, an educator, or a theatre company, and have been “ghosted.” My first reaction is to worry if I’ve committed some faux pas. Then I re-read my previous emails to find the offense. Most of the time I find nothing in my messages, beyond a sincere request for an answer or a response to whatever is the topic of the conversation/transaction.
Invariably, I will continue to follow up with requests for completion or closure to our conversation/transaction, and all too frequently no common courtesy response is provided.
“I done been ghosted!” I scream to the heavens after days of incommunicado. What a monumental waste of everyone’s time and energy that creates ill-will, when all that was necessary is just a 5-seconds-to-type end of discussion note like those that I suggested above.
There’s only one thing worse than suddenly being “dead” to your ghoster and that is never being responded to in the first place. I sometimes feel my email is like a homeless person asking for alms and the addressee just ignores it. They can’t be bothered with a simple, “Sorry, no.” This behavior is a recipe for resentment and possibly the fall of Western Civilization, if you ask me.
The Good Ole Days
Whenever someone begins to reference the “good ole” days, I usually turn my attention elsewhere pretty quickly, because most of the time I know what I’m about to hear is some rose-colored-glasses memory of how fabulous things used to be. However, when it comes to professional communication between co-workers, clients, service providers, and other business people in your network, there actually used to be an accepted common courtesy: if you were contacted by someone, you felt obligated to respond in a timely manner.
Even if you could not provide an answer to the query at that moment, you were expected to provide an acknowledgement that you were in receipt of the query. And I’m not talking about just email. I am old enough to remember the DBDC (days before digital communication). People would not hesitate to pick up the phone, or even type or hand write an acknowledgement of receipt or a response. Then they’d actually take time to pop it into the outgoing mail box or into a vacuum tube or even the hand of an errand boy to personally deliver it.
Nobody wants to go back to those bad old days of paper-plooza that lead to the death of so many forests, but I really would like to go back to the courtesy of providing timely acknowledgements and/or responses to queries. I mean it’s so much easier to do that now with a simple sentence typed into an email or chat box. “Thanks. I’ll get back to you.” Not counting the quotation marks, it took me under five seconds to type that and hit the “Send” button.
