I'm not alone on the great carousel of email traffic. Lots of us are busy tapping away at our keyboards, spewing characters across the screen and then hastily deleting them. How much time is spent pondering emails, day-in, day-out, in offices up and down the land? That pausing time, when you purse your lips and your eyes flick up and to the right while you think about the best way to phrase it... that's a lot of time, right there isn't it?
All day for me, pretty much.
It's because of this piece of work I've done that has to be precisely correct. I mean it's been analysed, deconstructed, reviewed and critiqued by three groups of people in two countries, thousands of miles of apart; it's been scrutinised by more knowledgeable minds than mine and it's been bouncing around the network in various attachments for weeks. I get that it has to be right, and to get it right means jumping on the carousel and waiting for the music to stop.
Email's fascinating as a kind of social technology. I love the silly jargon that you get. People talk about 'popping' something in and 'dropping' an email to so-and-so. Why would you drop an email? What does that even mean? Does it come from dropping an actual envelope into a postbox, I wonder? Funny how we've invented a brand new technology but we've actually gone backwards in time to talk about how we handle it.
If we're not popping, dropping, zipping and rattling through emails, we've gone further back in time to describe our email-activity... we're firing them off. How very old-fashioned! You load up your cannon (SMTP server) with your carefully designed projectile (email packet), point the thing in the right direction ('To' header), light the fuse (click Send) and stand well back.
Actually, that's a pretty good description. Boom.
By the end of the day, the music did stop, the cannons did cease-fire and I breathed a sigh of sweet relief and jumped off the fairground/battlefield. (In less-mixed metaphorical terms) I shut down Outlook and rolled my chair back. It might be my favourite part of the day, that. Normally, I stand up, whip my scarf from the back of the seat and fling it melodramatically around my neck. Then I pull on my gloves, slip into my coat, zip it up, grab my rucksack and rush out of the building like a man (quietly) possessed.
Brilliant. The sky was a kind of facebook-blue, laced with purple clouds. The lake was glowing with the warm reflection of office windows and cars sped past to join the trail of brake-lights waiting to shuffle out to the main road. I walked home, thinking of all the things I needed to do when I got there.
It was then that I realised that third on the list (after a cup of tea and a chat with the Intrepids of course) was sending an email to the choir about our next rehearsal. Marvellous, I thought to myself, another carefully-worded email. Marvellous.
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