The Bangers Ball (How Email Fucked Up Business)
I can’t do anything at work now without sending 20 e-mails and receiving 50 back, all with conflicting information and opinion’s, and petty arguments spreading out all over the Lotus Notes Server and around the office. I don’t mean right now, this minute, either. I mean all the fucking time.
I tend to keep my e-mails fairly short as well – it’s a tool. A communication device. Not a friendship creating magic wand.
Them: “Can we do X, Y or Z please and do it by circumventing the ABC?”.
Me: “No”.
You ask a question, you get a straight simple answer. I don’t want to enter into a debate about whether someone else could do it, or how you saw a Watchdog report on cowboy builders and how even they could flush the cache and glue the fuck to type quickly, I can’t do what you want. Let me do proper work that matters and that isn’t going to be changed halfway through me doing it and then changed again 2 days after I’ve finished.
I have a mind of my own and usually, when you wind me up, arm me with a specification/brief and point me in the right direction (2 tea’s please, YES AT ONCE) I’m quite capable of doing what I need to do. If I have a question, I’m going to get up, walk the ten feet to you desk, and whisper in your ear. I don’t need to e-mail you, because, quite literally I can touch my monitor and look, if I stretch a bit I can touch your monitor at the same fucking time.
If things get any worse here, we’ll stop answering the phones and start using them to send emails instead. Mouths will join up like that creepy bit in the Matrix and ears will fall off all over the place like a bout of electronic leperosy. All the time fingers will get faster and faster and the server will start spinning off the ground under the weight of all the CC’s. Whats that? An e-mail about a faulty door handle? E-mail the company! CC the world!! BCC God!!! DO IT!!!!
Mint