What kind of emailer are you?

Matt Beaumont E-males or she-mails – either way they plague us with their dreadful messages at work.
Matt Beaumont, author of the bestselling cult novel e. classifies your colleagues, type by terrible type…


There was an age when we had typewriters with golf balls; when a PC would say ‘Evening all’ rather than ‘Warning - an error of type-410 has occurred’.

There was an age when we had carbon paper
Office life now is very different. Now we have photocopiers that look like missile guidance systems – and sometimes they even work.

We have bosses who attend seminars that teach them to say, ‘It’s all about empowering you to realise your own true potential’ so you’ll feel really good about being fired.

And now we have email
I’ll nail my colours to the mast. I firmly believe that email is A Good Thing. I could hardly see it otherwise since I managed to stretch the concept of an email soap opera to 76,112 words and find a willing publisher.

  • Why email is such a fine invention isn’t so much that it allows us to do our work with more speed and efficiency (though I suppose it does, at least in theory), it’s that it has digitised office banter.

It’s the banter that is the lifeblood of any company, the spunk in the corporate gonads. In fact it’s often the only thing that makes getting up in the morning and hauling one’s knackered arse into the office bearable.

The company that doesn’t appreciate this and bans its employees from sending ‘personal’ emails is the company that deserves to go the way of carbon paper. It probably won’t, of course.

Email has got all of us writing again
The guardians of the English language who whinge that email is perverting the written word are entirely missing the point. The people who’re emailing one another with no regard for syntax weren’t writing at all before it came along. They might be expressing themselves in unpunctuated rivers of abbreviations but at least they’re expressing themselves.

Here’s an analogy. A little boy is born mute and doesn’t say a word for ten years. Then one day, out of the blue, he speaks. His words are hesitant, clumsy and barely intelligible but, all the same, he speaks. Do you react with a) ‘Lordy, lordy, hallelujah, the boy can talk!’ or b) ‘Hmm, was that a split infinitive?’?

Exactly
Now that email has been with us for a while a number of literary styles have evolved. Not all of them are good. In fact, some of them are crap. But you wouldn’t walk into a bookshop and expect to like every title on offer, so why should your inbox be packed with rattling good reads?

These e-types slot neatly into categories. Here’s a handy, cut-out-and-trash guide to the typical office emailer, be they good, mad or plug-ugly.

Norman e. Mailer
He would have a Booker, if only the literary world would look up from their Ivy main courses and take notice. Email is the perfect outlet for all that pent-up creativity. His maxim is ‘why use one word when fifty will do?’

He can turn a mundane report on the weekly meeting of the Purchasing Practices Steering Committee into something Proustian – long, profound and quite moving in parts but, frankly, an utter waste of kilobytes. If you must wade through his self-indulgent verbiage, console yourself with the fact that at least you haven’t paid £14.99 for it in Waterstones.

And-e McNab
He would be happier in the SAS but, damn it, the company needs him. He does the work of ten and succeeds in spite of the wishy-washy ineptitude around him. He operates alone and usually lunches at his desk on a bag of Salt ‘n’ Lineker and a Kit-Kat. Sandwich bars are for wimps. His emails are concise to the point of making little sense at all and make liberal use of

  • bullet points
  • to create
  • the illusion of
  • mercilessly efficient
  • management
  • of a brutally
  • heavy
  • work load.

Jack-e Collins
Her breathless emails usually begin with ‘you won’t believe this but…!!!’. No tit-bit is too small to fan into a firestorm of hot, hot, hot gossip. Close scrutiny of her PC will reveal a disproportionate amount of wear on the ‘!’ key.

e-nid Blyton
Like the best purveyors of literature for the immature, this lad (he’s usually a lad) always illustrates his work. He’s particularly fond of brightly coloured pictures of comedy genitalia, urine-drinking monkeys and ladies engaging in friendly hugs and kisses.

My personal favourite is the picture of the foreskin being nailed to a floorboard, which manages to both charm and inform (well, I didn’t know you could do that with a foreskin). Recently e-nid and his ilk have faced the sack from employers who haven’t taken well to their cheery pictorial exchanges – humourless, book-burning fascists, the lot of them.

Jeffr-e Archer
Forget your reading glasses. You’ll be better off with a machete because reading his emails requires you to hack through layers of clumsy construction and tedious repetition to reach the sense beneath. The trouble is that when you get there you invariably find it wasn’t worth bothering with in the first place.

Tom Clanc-e
This tech-head spurns any attempt at engaging his readers in an emotional, character-driven narrative. He much prefers to give them an arcane jumble of technical jargon.

Where Clancy has detailed descriptions of the workings of nuclear-powered hunter-killer subs and laser-guided smart bombs, this boy writes about LAN servers, ISDN links and other things I haven’t a bloody clue about.

But, listen up, Hollywood, his emails would probably make excellent action flicks starring Denzel Washington or Harrison Ford (and I understand that Alec Baldwin comes fairly cheap these days).

e-manuelle
This is a relatively new genre in the email oeuvre. This radical and outspoken woman writer clearly grew up with the Spice Girls and Madonna because she is proud of her sexuality and expresses it brazenly in her emails.

These usually take the form of a) a graphic description of what she did last night or b) a graphic shopping list of what she’d like to do after work. But she is no celebrity-craving media tart because the sole addressee is usually her boyfriend.

Should you be thinking of dabbling in this bold new form of erotica yourself, a word of warning. Don’t date a sleazy little braggart, unless you’re happy about your predilection for, say, a bit of Greek being turned into a chain letter and passed on to a global audience. Anyone know what Claire Swires is up to right now…?

And finall-e
This last group has no style. They are too bone-idle for that. Their emails read like lowercase streams of consciousness – not a capital or punctuation mark in sight. Well, it's just so much bloody effort, isn't it? As for the lazy slobs who leave steaming squeezed-out tea bags on the worktop in the office kitchenette, well, now you know who they are.