When I'm at work: I hate it when someone forwards me a huge email thread with 10 or 15 previous emails arguing back and forth between 5 different groups, and simply says "Hey can you help out here?" or something. Forcing me to read the entire thing from the bottom up and figure out what the hell is going on with it.  I'm not an email reading machine and frankly I have better things to do.

Instead, how about you give me a quick 2 sentence summary of what the problem is and how you think I might be able to help?  Your 1 minute spent doing that would save me 10 or 15 minutes of reading and figuring out.  I might not even be able to help, so then it's just a big waste of time for everybody involved.

In the old days before email this is how things would get done: you'd phone me, or visit my office, and explain the problem to me, and I'd probably be able to instantly offer a solution.  Nowadays half the people I work with are too lazy to do this and so they just shove the problem along to the next guy.  Where's the professionalism?