Email Sucks

I hate email. (Come on everyone... ya know you hate it too.) Email sucks and everyday it gets worse and worse. And, I am not just talking about spam. Spam is easy. I filter it out with my ISP tools. And, poof it's gone. Most of my friends just text me via cell phone (... don't get me started on text messages... argh!) and I retrieve that easily and answer quickly.

No, this is about email and doing business with email. And, yes I know about WAVE. I am not sure that would have streamlined this situation because words can be misunderstood no matter where it is. But, the majority of us are still using email to conduct business. I hate dialogue using email. I hate it. Half the stuff doesn't make sense because it's in a conversation that refers back to past emails that I can't remember. So you end up saying, "Wha?!?" And, the recipient says, "Huh?" and so on and on.

For the last 3 days, I have been having a dialogue with three members of my company. A situation came up where 3 managers were in miscommunication. Three different individuals with three different perspectives and three different solutions. None of it made sense to any of us. No matter how we communicated in the email, we kept misunderstanding each other.

We emailed our conversations in paragraph form. The worst. Who can read a block of words when there are 300 other emails in the inbox. Then we emailed in list form. A bit better. At least it was easier on the eyes.

Then we started calling each other to explain the emails. Then we asked each other to confirm in email our verbal conversation so we could make sure that we were all on the same page. There were still misunderstandings. I thought it would never end. Three days of back and forth. Finally, we all gave up. Now, I know why we do the team-building rafting thing. It helps us to have a release from this craziness.

I am ashamed to say that I started ignoring the emails. Somehow, the email got deleted. Somehow, it never arrived into my in-box. Somehow, it was lost in the loop never to be found again. Ohhhh, yes, I finally resorted to deleting everything. It was email madness, and I could not stop myself. (Whew... it was only a dream...)

But, I did ignore some of the dialogue between us three. It just got ridiculous. So we all went back to our own perspectives, and the job got done correctly without all the minutiae and dissection. We are in our positions because someone trusts us to do our jobs right. So, that is what we did and forgettaabutta rest.

Note: These guys need to go on a river trip. Go outside! Get on the river and do a whitewater trip! Connect with yourself and Mother Nature. California rafting trips is in your back yard...

WET River Trips 1.888.723.8938 for help on office psychosis... hee hee.

Thanks to google images, www.spring.org.uk and wet river trips for photos.