Email is dying
26 May 2010
Email is dying. Well, at least mine seems to be. In the last month I’ve noted a steady decline in the number, length and quality of communications in my mailbox.
Maybe no-body likes me anymore (which is credible). Or maybe it’s a product of the last recession and the fear people now have of losing their jobs. Folk who used to send me big chatty emails about what they were eating and listening to on their i-pods while they probably should have been just answering work queries are now sending me things like.
Sorry, no time, will get back to you before end of week.
Maybe it’s to do with layoffs, down-sizing and multi-tasking, or it’s part of some surveillance-of-the-workforce clampdown by IT departments, but four out of the ten emails I got last week were variations on the same rather surprising message:
Let’s arrange a time to talk.
Are we seriously returning to a time when we prefer to use the phone? Or one when we have to talk behind our employers backs? Or have we reached information meltdown and just decided to turn the clock back? Studies show that under 21s consider email of use only when talking to ‘Old people’ (which must mean me). Of course they are tweeting and poking and sending each other virtual flowers and virtual beer bottles and not really communicating at all, but studies are showing that, perhaps due to almost unlimited call times on new phone deals, even the tweetiest teen is actually starting to 'talk'.
There may be some good reasons for ‘the return to talking’. First of all is the protracted email misunderstanding (PEM). I don’t know how many times I’ve sent someone something then had to endure days of silent waiting only to receive a reply like:
What did you mean by ‘my big fat American butt’ ?
Twenty five email apologies are then sent in which I have to make it clear that, yes, this was a joke, that it was based on a popular expression and perhaps should have been placed in quotation marks so as to make the ironic intention clear; that the person in question actually has a very lovely butt and so on and so on. The whole problem could have been avoided in the first place by just picking up the goddamn phone.
Worst of all is the king of all email faux pas. A thing I call the CC-F-up (not to be confused with the F-Cup, which is a bra size). How to do it, and get caught by IT and then into serious, legal trouble is as follows: First you do some chatty email banter with your e-buddy, some of which expresses your personal opinions and maybe a bit of flirty bitching about some fellow colleague by the name of Ted (let's call him that). You and e-buddy exchange many emails and to save time you hit REPLY each time you do it rather than COMPOSE. So you are both replying to each others replies or ‘ping-ponging’ and so the email gets bigger and bigger. And Ted becomes this running joke between you both.
Then one fated day you are pressed for time and you get a message from e-buddy which is serious and work-related, but nonetheless has all of your twenty witty exchanges at the bottom of it. You don’t notice this and so in replying to her serious question and having to CC it to heads of department, one of whom is Ted, 25 people get an email that half way down it’s 40 pages contains the line.
Yup, I swear Ted jerks off in the office toilets.
Let’s just say that something very like this once happened to me, and livelihoods, including my own were placed at risk, and I do have a tendency to encourage this kind of exchange in others. Maybe this is why no-one emails me anymore.
Or perhaps the email has returned to it's original usage as a kind of dull inter office memo and real life happens elsewhere. Email was a bastard hybrid anyway, somewhere between a letter and a short-hand text message. It shall, no doubt, end up in the bin of history along with other half-way inventions such as carbon paper and microfiche.
I shall miss it.
Please CC this to all heads of staff.
P.S I will miss you
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