The Long and Short of corporate E-mails

Been in this job for close to 6 years, of sending and receiving mails :), that I now know this first hand. Infact, I am one step ahead when it comes to sending and receiving, do an F9 whenever I want an updated dream. . But jokes apart, I had this sudden rush of emotion when I started blogging this one. We talk about sustainability; Save trees, save planet, save water, save electricity, save fuel, save wood, blah blah, and all that s***. We have missed out one core component, save on e-Mails. I am sure if we stop sending e-mails for one day, we could save power to make us survive for one whole day (I am not sure how environmentalists arrive at this figure but that's how it is so, just shut-up and listen).

When I say we save power through not sending mails, I am talking about all those crap mails which are sent around everyday, and which spams our inbox. And it is not from any fake site selling Viagra or Cialis, it is from our very own colleagues and it is not just the Miss World wallpapers that are sent around, it is something related to work which spams the inbox.

You might be wondering, I must be some sort of Kaam chor (work thief, meaning, person who tries to avoid work). Well not exactly. Just to highlight what I am trying to say, there was an issue a long time ago in one of my many jobs,which actually boiled over into an escalation. One person drafted and sent an e-Mail, to me, a colleague of mine, the culprit, his manager, his VP, his LOB head. Apart from that he sent my manager an FYI, (not sure why he did that).

The culprit's VP forwarded the mail to the field sales colleague who inturn forwarded the mail to the entire Sales management DL. Now this mail was then circulated back to the culprit who replied back with another colleague's contact who happened to work in Culprit's team (without cc'ing the culprit #2). The sales team replied back to the culprit #2 with "Could you please help us here". Now this culprit #2 was a dumbass. Instead of scrolling through the mail and finding out who had initiated the thread, he just picked up any damn section of the thread (in which I was involved) and replied to all. Now if you see, how many iterations the same mail (+ the delta) might have traversed, it actually did one round trip around the world and finally ended in the same team.

Now all you environment philanthropists, come up with a damn idea for making sure jackasses like the one above are punished under some PETA like law which prohibits them from clicking the "Reply All" button in Outlook.

Time to run for a meeting. C ya later.