I used to love email. I seriously thought it was more professional, more methodological and more formal and more meaningful than text/SMS or chat/IM, etc.
Other groups of people who either do not respect the medium or have given email a bad name.
I thought owning a BlackBerry was cool, but one of the big flaws was I couldn’t have full IMAP email, then I went onto the iPhone in December 2011 and realized how cool it was to have an entire inbox on the palm of my hand like I could on my desktop. (POP3 is perfect for small email servers or the ol days of dialup, where once it downloads onto the client, it “pops” away off the server, is the non technical way to describe it.
But with everything, joy disappears. The alleged honeymoon period lasted a decade plus.
It wasn’t necessarily the tech, but the people on the other end. Apparently I showed too much love to email that people took advantage of it.
In the last year it got worse. People in professional circles would send me longwinded emails with up to twenty sentences per paragraph. The biggest pet-peeve was the excessive, liberal use of High Priority, and was used completely indiscriminately. It was more of “Look At Me, Smell my ugly Pits! I am so great you must drop everything and you’ll get back to me!” Worse was professionals would accidentally send out emails; with the failed attempt to recall emails – assuming I am an Exchange shop (of which I am not), and that the email would magically disappear. Do these people realize no one is using Outlook in the masses as much? In fact I haven’t used Outlook in years! I still liked the overall Outlook interface; but do not support the O365 approach.
I also had clashed with the millennials, and intra-generation fights. One former professional was so overwhelmed of a 2 page email, despite it being properly written with appropriate sentences per graphs and it being outlined. Younger people today treat email like SMS or chats; I find that alarming because this leads to a culture of inappropriate communications and if you mix Slack-talk in email, it can really bite you if a discovery is required. I think chat-like emails are more apparent then than back in the 90s or early 00s by boomers and Gen Xers.
The biggest pet-peeve was the excessive, liberal use of High Priority, and was used completely indiscriminately. It was more of “Look At Me, Smell my ugly Pits! I am so great you must drop everything and you’ll get back to me!”
Oh the multi-thread replies… that was the worse. If developments occurred over the weekend, I had “professionals”; would literally react to every reply. If say there was an instance where I had threads, both were responsive replies, one was a correction to the other, the person would still react to all three and personalize each one. This individual was under high stress and was known in circles for being a chain-smoker. The job didn’t need to be high-stress to begin with.
The joy is no longer. There is no sense of happiness as much as I used to. This isn’t because my responsibilities changed; it’s the other groups of people who either do not respect the medium or have given it a bad name.