“My Email Is a Monster”

Via The Oatmeal, some artfully articulated truths about those every-present entities that buzz and buzz and BUZZ about our office-worker heads each and every day. (Click for the full reveal or head on over to the site itself. The whole thing’s great, but especially the last frame. The punchline. The punch in the gut.) I enjoy Inman’s work — he’s a fixture in the ol’ feedreader — but this one really resonated. Probably because seeing the “process” of e-communication laid out this way made me realize that I’m often on both sides of the E-Emotional Response coin.

As I work my way through the mountain of office emails that pour in each and every day  — a bespectacled and fretful Sisyphus — I find myself simultaneously weighed down by the emails I’ve just received (which want/demand immediate responses) and griping irritably to myself about the lack of replies in response to the emails I’ve just sent — in many cases, emails that went  to the very same people whose electronic requests have me feeling so beset upon in the first place.

Talk about the value of walkin’ a mile in somebody else’s shoes…I can’t even walk in my own shoes for more than a couple of seconds at a time. I recognize the insatiable emails of others, and turn right ’round to complain (to myself) about the fact that my own insatiability is not being satiated. My email’s a monster, all right. But for some reason, even as I see it as a monster, I’m poking it with a stick.

I should probably stop doing that. (And thanks for the reminder, Oatmeal.)

So, the next time you send an email and get a brief, curt, or nonexistent reply, remember who you’re feeding.