“Did you follow-up with that customer?”
“Yeah… I sent him an email.”
***Really?***
“Hey, did you talk to Larry about getting his numbers up?”
“Yeah, I detailed it in an email.”
*** Right!***
“Hey, you missed the meeting! Didn’t you get my email?”
“No, I never received an email from you.”
Email sucks… period.
Email serves two purposes:
- The first purpose is to”communicate” with a customer, co-worker, friend, etc. who you really don’t want to deal with. You really don’t want to take any kind of personal responsibility for whatever the situation is, so you shoot an email off to someone .
- The second purpose is to cover your ass in the event that someone accuses you of abdicating your responsibility. “I didn’t drop the ball on the Smith project. I sent an email…” And I bet you have a copy of that sent email in some file or folder proving you didn’t drop the ball.
Email sucks.
Have you ever taken some time off… you know, like, say, a weekend, and you come back to work and have a stinking pile of email to go through? In addition to trying to get some actual work done, you know, like attending meetings and stuff, you have to find the time to sift through a buttload of mindless email. And usually about 5% of the email has anything at all to do with you. And then, because you are trying to get through the email, most of which is of absolutely no interest to you, you actually miss an email where, at the very end of an email written by someone who is trying to be Shakespeare writing Hamlet or something, you miss something that does pertain to you. And then the Shakespeare wanna-be follows up with an email asking why you didn’t follow up on his original email… which you didn’t know really had anything to do with you because your mind started to numb-over in the fifth paragraph and you didn’t make it to the end and actually discover that there was some instruction for you at the end of the email. And you act like you don’t know what Shakespeare is talking about (because you don’t know what Shakespeare is talking about), and Shakespeare says, “It was in my email!”
Email sucks. Have I mentioned that yet?
Email used to be great. Man, the jokes I used to get forwarded to me were hilarious! Oh how I’d laugh at the recycled Little Johnnie jokes. The Bill Clinton Jokes never got old — he just made it way too easy, you know, with the cigars and the “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” and the Hilary…
Now, I’m so busy using stupid email for “work” that I don’t even take the time to read the funny forwards; they go straight in the trash. Email as a joke delivery system was one thing. Email used as a method of actually conducting serious business… well… sucks.
The only nice thing about email is you can say you never received the email. Abdication of personal responsibility on both ends…
And don’t even get me started on the constantly ringing phones. Does anyone ever call a business without a problem that needs to be resolved? They are paying a bill because not paying the bill is a problem. They need new service because not having service poses a problem. They have a problem with the service… these are the most funnest of all! Problems, problems, problems, all day long. Hey, I got problems of my own! What makes you think I want to deal with your stupid problems… oh yeah… it’s my job. Jobs, email, and especially jobs with email… you know where this is going…
If it hadn’t been for my email, you might not have gotten this blog done in time?
This is pretty much how I feel about text’s.