Who says the art of conversation is dead?
11:02:29 – So, what did you do at the weekend
11:02:54 – Ahh yeah, just the ususal. . .
11:03:39 – Did you hook up with your one from last week?
11:04:22 – Nah didn’t see them about
And so on. . . .
chatSPAM – email conversations that create an unnecessary load on the server, waste your time and eat up productivity quicker than a hungry T-Rex on a chicken farm.
I’m guilty of it I admit. Very guilty. As are you. I worked with one guy many years ago who would send email for the sake of it, just for a laugh with a splash of boredom. It was great receiving his messages but from a business point of view very wasteful. One more memorable messages arrived on a day the office building got struck by lightning, as the IT manager walked through the office and told us all to save what we were doing as there had been “a strike”, within 2 minutes I’d received an email with a MS Clipart picture of a F16 superimposed on a city outline. Lightning strike, air strike. . . .go figure.
chatSPAM is becoming increasingly prevalent in this day and age. We’re now seeing more and more emailed conversations being sent on and legal cases coming through because of the incriminating evidence trail that you cant deny “was taken the wrong way”. Workers are forgetting that everything they send is being monitored and stored, and used against them in a court of law. Hey, why not? If I had a guy working for me spent 30% of his day emailing for the sake of it, he’d be seriously disciplined and monitored for a period of time after that.
Some people may say it does no harm, but aside from the productivity, theres the load on the servers. There are also legal issues that if a conversation gets outside of the company it could destroy them. Just because the company equipment was used. While some may argue that it is upto the company to monitor resource usage, there is also a great deal of responsibility on the worker to use the equipment responsibly.
Why do we feel the need to converse through email? Does it give us something to hide behind? Can we be a different persona by using email? The above four lines of conversation can be played out in under a minute. Why not go stand by the watercooler and talk? Get up and wander across the office to discuss something. Its good stress relief too. If we all end up playing out our working lives through email conversations, how we interact with people will change drastically, we will become more reclusive and the office affair will be no more.
We need more social intercourse people!
Spudmasher (Mobilize Mail Client)
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