What kind of emailer are you?
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?’?
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Created: 19/02/2004 Updated: 19/02/2004
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