Thanks for your email – I’ve deleted it

When I returned from holiday to work recently, I had 180 emails.

I was chuffed, as I was expecting a lot more.

In the past, over 300 hasn’t been uncommon for a week away from the office. I’m assuming that, should I ever go away for more than two weeks, hitting four figures is entirely possible. I’ll then need another holiday to recover once I’ve cleared them.

A sense of creeping dread always accompanies the last couple of days of precious freedom, with the knowledge of the impending email marathon looming large on the horizon.

The fact that everyone you see during your first morning back asks how your break was, and allows you enough time to say “It rained quite a lot, and I caught Ebola...” before jumping in and asking what you’re doing about their email, doesn’t help.

Apparently, replying with “I reckon I’ll hit Tuesday before lunch, so if you sent it after that come back tomorrow.” is considered unhelpful, whilst saying “Email? I can’t even remember who you are.” is ‘unprofessional’.

Trawling through an endless series of conversations that have all resolved themselves, or getting cracking on a task, only to discover that “we sorted that. Sorry – didn’t I email you?” is a wretched experience we could all do without.

My colleagues could probably do without me going bulgy-eyed and spluttery too, come to think of it.

Guess what? German efficiency can help with this! Car giants Daimler have instigated a policy that allows their employees to choose: Come back to a metric motherload of mail, or have an out of office message that informs the sender their email is being deleted, and they can either send it again when you’re back, or contact someone else if its urgent.

This isn’t a rare case of our Germanic chums showing a sense of humour either. As you might expect, they’ve done some studies into work-life balance, and have the wellbeing of their workforce at heart, largely because a happy worker is an efficient worker.

Having discussed this idea with a couple of my colleagues (when I should probably have been reading last Wednesday afternoon’s emails), what seemed like a bonkers idea to start with steadily became of work of genius when scrutinized.

A large percentage of my emails are parts of an exchange that people thought I needed to know about. Great – send me the last one when I get back, or let me know the specific bit that affects me.

Another bunch of missives are the informational “Fire drill on Tuesday, photocopier broken, who licked my yoghurt?” ones – useless by the time I return (except maybe the yoghurt one, as I normally do that, so who else is?).

The junk mail offering to enlarge certain bits of my body, and general advertising, would be eliminated too.

It’s great idea – I could get straight back into the really important task of sending my colleagues loads of emails first thing on Monday.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 22nd of August 2014, where it was retitled "Email influx sparks dread". You can view the edited version on their website here - it lost the 'needing a 2nd holiday' and 'bulgy-eyed' lines altogether in the edit.

This week saw me suffer one of my most irritating writing problems - whilst daydreaming on my drive home from work, I thought of several killer lines for a column, and then had to desperately try and remember them for the rest of the way home, eventually memorising one key word for each idea (Sorcerer, Manager, Lunch - if you must know) and then repeating those words in time to the music on the stereo. Remarkably, it worked.

I do carry a notebook with me in my man bag but, for some reason, the police find it irritating if you try and write stuff down whilst driving along winding Cumbrian roads.

(This post accompanied by "Blank & Jones present so80s 8", an interesting selection of 12" versions over 3 CDs, that I largely bought for Men Without Hats' "Pop Goes The World", but discovered a great version of Ultravox's "Dancing With Tears In My Eyes" that I hadn't heard before, plus a track called "Gambit" by Cretu, which sounds very Enigma-ish, and is rather fab. It should do really, as he's the geezer in charge of Enigma.)

A fisful of change at the shops

A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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