Electronic mail at the workplace can be a horrid pain in the ass. I honestly wish I could disable it. I think I have something like 100 megabytes of space, which is pretty damn low for the hundreds to thousands of email I get a day. Yeah it’s a lot…a lot of crap. 99% of these emails don’t even apply to me, yet I have to sift through most of them to see what does involve me. I don’t know about you people out there, but I actually have more filter rules set up on my work email than on any other email address that I have. I believe the reason for all the email is that people have an innate desire to provide status on everything, whether informative or not. At my workplace, part of the day to day duties is considered somewhat production related, although manager’s won’t call it that since it would most likely piss off a lot of employees and hence potentially a riot of programmers, which would be mighty funny to see if you ask me. Instead they call it “Support engineering” or something pretty damn close to that (Management and their crazy terminology). Well, *every* damn thing has to send email to either say: “Hey! I broke! Look at me!” or “Hey! I finished without problems! Look at me anyway!” Those types of emails are the most prevalent and cover a couple hundred emails. Fortunately they follow some sort of template format and are easy to filter out…but there’s always someone out there that changes it up and ruins my filter! (Damn you email gnome!)

Filter…delete…permanently.

Now what I find odd, and please let me know if it happens at your work as well, is that there are people who do the whole “reply all” to respond with one single word, so far it’s always in the format of “yes” or “no”… now that’s really just damn annoying. I mean seriously, I’ve just wasted precious time that I could have spent playing a game, breathing, zoning out, planning a prank, and I suppose I could have been doing work as well. What’s doubly annoying is that there’s no accompanied reason with the one word response. Do I need to pay for it? Maybe everybody can read minds but me, and if that’s the case, then I am in much deeper trouble than I previously thought.

Delete… delete…delete!

“Mailbox stuffing” is a term I’ve come to use for people who are trying figure out a problem by spamming everyone with an email that contains a large attachment… of course people in turn “reply all” and a thread of email is born. Of course, I end up getting stuck on this thread that keeps getting bigger… and bigger. Several emails have bloated passed the 5 megabyte range, when that happens my email program either just barfs or renders my computer useless by using one hundred percent of my 3+ GHz Pentium 4 processor. Honestly, is it that $%*&#@ hard to read an email????

My delete keyboard button is looking more used than… (Insert your own analogy here).