please empty your brain below

All too true, nice excuse for linking to the kitten shooting game!

Sounds much more exciting ...

Reality and Office collide. As long as you arent being sexist DG .
Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.
Jean-Paul Sartre

Doesn't happen in our office. Not on email anyway. Such conversations happen on MSN Messenger (sorry Windows Live Messenger), Yahoo! messneger or Google Talk. Progressive eh?

I heard on the radio the other day that the average person spends 2 hours per day of work time on non-work related email and web browsing.

Another spurious statistic maybe, but, who is meant to be managing these people?

Unfortunately I've never been lucky enough to work anywhere where I've had a moment to breathe, let alone engage in this sort of banality. Actually - scrub that - I'd hate to work in that sort of brain-dead environment.

Ha! Sounds like a lot of fun to me.

Love the kitten shooting game.

2 hours? That's not long enough.

Tried the kitten game.
Our cat got off the bed and came to look.
Had to cover his eyes.

I *wish* that happened in my office. I work with two other people, both of whom are technically my boss. It's hideous. A random comment on Monday that Des O'Connor is the new presenter of Countdown had them tutting.

We don't get any gossip in our place. I may e-mail around the Kitten shooting game though.

My work colleagues don't do this so much. But a number of them haven't quite mastered the correct use of the "Reply to All" function, or of the "all staff" email alias. So we get a lot of sequences like this:

Bob emails [email protected], [email protected], [email protected],
CC: [email protected]

with some sort of message relevant only to Jan, Ken, Lou. But possibly relevant to some other members of staff, wouldn't want to leave anyone out.

Jan, Ken, Lou are also on the allstaff list, so they get the message twice. Ken replies to all "Please don't send me duplicate emails, I get enough mail as it is.". Jan and Lou get this message twice because they're on the staff list too.

Jan replies to all "I got your message twice too, maybe the email server is broken". Also cc'd to [email protected] (who are already on the all staff list).

Then other people not involved in the exchange start replying to all, to complain about all the replies-to-all. (Un?)fortunately they seldom degenerate into name calling and personal insults.

Of course all these messages have subject lines like
Re: RE: Re: Re: FWD: meeting tomorrow?

and are full of top posting (unlike the sequence you illustrated, most of my co-workers put their response *above* anything they're quoting).

oops i guess your sequence was entirely top-posted, shows how closely I read it.

I think that Deerslayer of Louisiana has a bit too much time on his hands.

A fair bit of kitten blood too.

I expect they don't realise big boss is watching them.

Nobody at my work is quite that inane, we also don't have proper water cooler gossip even though we do have a water cooler. I can't remember the last time I felt compelled to watch Beastie Benders just to have some social capital and be able to join in!

I find it really tragic that people live such a boring 8hr day. Perhaps they live longer-though? I was going to suggest they become self-employed and enjoy their workday by working hard. I lasted 6 months, straight from school in such a dead-end environment before embarking on a sales career. Ooooops shouldn’t be typing this during the day.

Of course that happens in our office.

But, instead of doing it all by e-mail, we go to the local pub and say it all very loudly.

"I think I might phone in sick tomorrow"

Are people really that dumb? Are they unaware that EVERY email you write at work is saved and can be read by HR(and definitely will be read when they decide they want to get rid of you). That email alone is pretty much grounds for dismissal. Who would put that in writing and then send it through the work email?

Your idea was just nicked by a DJ on 6 music!!!

22:15 it was, you can check out the live stream if you can be bothered.....

If HR read my emails I'm gone. You strike me as the paranoid type, Noel, I think you might need to chill out a bit. I think everyone has written something that could be construed as dodgy on work email. What are they gonna do - sack all of us?

Des O'Connor? Is he really?

Anyway, chance would be a fine thing, DG. No one has a spare moment in our office to engage in meaningless e-mails like this, and nearly all of us have PC screens which are directly overlooked by our two managers. Of course, there is one exception and that's when the managers decide to send some novelty e-mail. Apparently that's perfectly acceptable and is called 'team building'. If we do it, it's 'time wasting'.

kjones? kjones!
Pepe, in Spain

No not paranoid, I work in compliance for a bank. I'm the sad sap who's forced to read through all those emails when the bank wants to sack someone. Granted, it depends a bit on your industry (and maybe your country), but in banking/ finance in the U.S.(after Enron and Worldcom), ALL emails are retained and randomly reviewed. In fact, they have programs called 'spiders' which crawl through the email system looking for key words (fraud, steal, violation, sex etc.) Emailing something like "I'm planning on pretending to be sick tomorrow" is a spectacularly bad idea.











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