Modern day correspondence, or "how I suck at email"
Hi, my name is Greg and I am a bad emailer. See - I even just make up verbs when working in a purley electronic form of communication. Actually, my vocabulary has been declining at an insane pace over the last few years. It's like dealing with computer people for the majority of the day five days a week isn't actually a good way to get better at English and proper grammar. Go figure.
But I digress.
We get an insane amount of email at work. Probably related to that, I suck at email at work and I suck at personal email. What do I mean by that? Basically, any email gets skimmed quickly when it arrives so I can figure out how critical it is to respond immediately. Things like “answer this or get fired” have a pretty rapid turnaround. Everything else eventually gets a response that day or week unless Outlook tricks me into thinking I've already responded*. Periodically I completely clean up my inbox and reach a state of virtual nirvana and am immediately punished by the email gods by recieving a deluge of new email.
What does this mean for personal emails? Basically, the same thing as above only the response times are exponentially worse! I use another account for most personal mails and read everything fairly quickly (same day). When I get an email from someone I haven't spoken to in a long time I have great intentions of crafting an in-depth meaningful email back. Which waits... and waits... and sometime MONTHS later gets written and sent. And sometimes just never get finished, written and sent at all.
Why bring this up? I've just spent part of the evening catching up on long-lost personal correspondence! I didn't get very far down the list and I wouldn't call any of the mails particularly earthshattering, incredibly deep or detailed. But it is a first step. Now if I can just write the rest of the people I've been meaning to, and do so on a quasi-regular basis then I'll be doing quite well indeed.
Oh, and if you happen to be reading this and have sent me personal email that I haven't responded to, please don't be offended. I'm not ignoring you on purpose. Send me another email with how you're doing. I'll reply. I swear.
*There's a feature in Outlook where if you start to respond to something and leave it open too long, it marks the email with a 'responded' icon. It has no actual relation to whether you ever SENT the response or not. Which, since I open stuff to respond all the time and sometimes close them without saving a draft, there's a percentage of things that just never get a response until I get an angry follow-up mail :(
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Updates:
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5/14/05 - Edit to clean up grammar and punctuation a little bit. I think I was right in saying my English is going to crap. Not claiming that the text is hugely perfect but it should be a bit more readable. I might actually be addicted to commas. :|