For once, this shouldn't be an email
Or, the cost of instant communication
Do me a favour, put your wariness aside. We’re getting woo woo for a moment.
The other day, I was on my massage therapist’s treatment table and noticed she was spending a lot of time on my hands. I was really feeling it, too. There was significant pain, then ease. We don’t typically spend a lot of time on my hands, so I asked what she was feeling.
She asked if I’d been dealing with emotionally difficult communication recently. When I asked her to clarify, she asked if there had been any particular work stress, life stress or relational stress that required communication via text or email. Yes, I said.
“I think about this often,” she mused. “In a world of technology, our words are in our hands and fingers. We spend time at our keyboards, writing and emoting. Think about how you feel when you’re writing something stressful or painful, or reading a text or an email that feels the same. Your body has a reaction, your shoulders are at your ears, and your hands are tense. I can feel all of it in here.”
The way she said it, simple and matter-of-fact, seemed so obvious. Yes, of course.
How are we going from massage to, well, anywhere relevant?
Stay with me here.
Last week, there was a PR mess unlike anything I’ve seen in a long time. Not a massive corporation or a client, but a local business. You couldn’t open Instagram, Facebook, or Reddit without seeing it and the endless pages of commentary.
The issue was this: the business was using video of an unhoused woman attempting to conceal (likely steal, but hey, I can’t know motive or intention from a 15-second video) a pair of socks. The video itself wasn’t really the problem. The problem was how it was made, with shitty crime-style TikTok music and a lame caption positioning themselves as “empaths.” An employee commented that she’d never laughed so hard while editing something.
People responded accordingly.
The woman in the video wasn’t violent. She wasn’t aggressive. The interaction was uncomfortable for the employee, yes, but ultimately benign. And the subject of the video was someone visibly vulnerable, trying to take socks. On a cold day.
People asked the business to take it down.
Within a day, they doubled down.
In a six-slide Instagram post, they reframed the video as an attempt to “start a conversation” about the hardships businesses face in areas disproportionately impacted by homelessness.
Here’s the thing.
That sentiment, in isolation, isn’t wrong.
I live in that area. I can practically see this business from my window. It’s in the downtown core of a mid-sized city, where unhoused people tend to be because it’s where they have access to resources, transportation, and public spaces. When I step outside for a run, a coffee, or my allergy medication at the pharmacy across the street, it’s not unusual to pass someone sleeping on the sidewalk or asking for change.
I don’t think much of it. This is where they live, too.
I’m also not naive. Mental illness and addiction can lead to erratic or unsafe behaviour. You adapt accordingly.
I don’t wear noise-cancelling headphones. I park in a secure, sheltered location. I carry naloxone, extra pads and tampons. When friends visit, I offer my extra stall or walk them to their cars. On the rare occasion I have cash or change, it’s up for grabs. I’ve been approached by a large man in a ski mask who said something I couldn’t make out through the muffling of a mouth against fabric. I told him to leave me the fuck alone, and he did.
I choose to live here because I like it.
And choosing to live here means choosing to live in community with marginalized, economically disadvantaged, and vulnerable people.
This business made the same choice.
There is no argument against the fact that businesses are impacted by the socioeconomic conditions of the areas they operate in. That’s not controversial or up for debate. If you want to advocate for change, good. Do it. Talk to city council. Show up to public meetings. Write to the Business Improvement District. Implement internal policies that keep your staff safe.
What I don’t recommend is using a vulnerable person as content, framing it as humour, and then, when criticized, retrofitting it into “socially nuanced dialogue.”
The original post has since been deleted, so I can’t give you the exact language, but trust me, it was tone deaf, and it gave people exactly what they needed to tear it apart. It was almost comically bad.
From a communications perspective, it was baffling.
They had thousands of comments. Clear, immediate feedback, and a very obvious path forward: remove the video, acknowledge the misstep, apologize if you feel it’s warranted, and move on. Instead, they escalated. Two posts with thousands of comments and almost none of them supportive.
I don’t advocate for lying in your marketing and communications, but I do advocate for strategy. This was the opposite of strategic.
I couldn't make sense of it. No one I spoke to could make sense of the decision-making either.
And then I’m lying on this table, my hands being worked through, and my massage therapist is talking about how much of our emotional life now moves through our fingers and phones.
Something started clicking.
How many times have I sent a text that should’ve been a phone call?
How many times have I received something that should’ve been said face-to-face?
How many times have I posted something, carefully worded, punctuated, edited, only to realize afterward that it didn’t actually communicate what I meant? Or that, really, it was not something I needed to communicate at all, or actually, maybe I don’t even feel that way?
Because I hadn’t fully processed it yet. Or because the medium itself is limited in how it can portray what anyone is trying to say.
We have this constant access to instant expression, a constant output, and no friction between feeling something and publishing it.
When I reflect on this mess, I see an owner who was overwhelmed and defensive, rightfully frightened by a barrage of negative sentiment, too embedded in their own perspective to step outside of it long enough to hear what people were actually saying, and too eager to respond when what was needed was a pause.
It’s a human reaction to have.
But it’s a human reaction playing itself out in a space where the stakes are both unclear and amplified, using the same tools we use to post our coffee or our dogs or our pasta salad and to respond to crisis.
And once it’s out, it’s out.
So, let this be your reminder that just because you can doesn't mean you have to pick up the phone, send a message, publish a post. Sometimes the most strategic thing you can do, for your business, your relationships, or your own sanity, is to not say anything yet.
If for nothing else, do it for your hands that are holding your keyboard and all of the emotions flowing through it. It starts to get real crampy in there.