Work. The final frontier. The carefree life of a quail farmer- loads of tiny boxes, special tweezers to extract the eggs. Or the sweat-and-blood existence of a macaroni core extractor, labouring day after day with his miniature pasta swizzle, to create hollow delights for you and me.
Honest work.
Truth is, it is hard to come by. Harder to keep. No matter how sweet the dream, how intense the effort. You may have lofty goals of being an office administrator when you are six years old, but there are only so many offices in the world. If of an entrepreneurial bent, you could open your own office to administer, buy the stationery, create a filing system, but you need the lesser roles of management in order to give your dream substance. You’ll need money to hire a university graduate who knows how to speak in the diarrhoeal verbosity of someone with a library full of tomes such as ‘Take Your Cheese and Shove it’, or, ‘the Lonely Life of the Long-distance Skyper’
As it is said, “The devil makes work for idle hands”. He did. It’s called email. Sometimes I feel like the sum total of my professional life is clicking send, reply to all, please find document attached, warm regards… Of course, when I was a child, there was no email- no personal computer either- so it is fair that my pre-adolescent dreams of finding the fossilised skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the back garden seemed realistic. If you’d told me I’d be spending my days shooting messages down cables, I would have laughed so loud it would have drowned out the Buck Rogers re-runs on the technicolour television.
Something I still don’t get about text messages and emails- you confirm receipt, and then the other person sends a message thanking you for the confirmation of receipt, and then you thank them for their confirmation of your confirmation. Where does it end? By the time of the second confirmation, you usually need to correct something in the original email, so it starts all over again… There should be a polite way of saying ENOUGH! THIS CONVERSATION IS HEREBY DEAD!
I can’t be alone in trying to deal with emails over the weekend- to come into work on a Monday morning and find an intray with 20, 30, 40 emails is unnerving. You can spend the entire day confirming this, cc’ing that. I suppose the expression ‘going postal’ refers to the way all the paper mail used to arrive in the mail sorting office on a Monday, sending the post guy off the deep end. Now we all have the luxury of having our own post offices, and the opportunity to go off the deep end on our own.
And no matter how hard you read what you’ve just typed, the law of email states that after seeing the confirmation message ‘sent’ you will notice the most glaring of errors- misspelling of names, nonsense words like thnkyou, or warm regrads… It’s the curse. The devil has you on his chain gang, and you’ll never escape.
Please find the attached document with information on how to break free.
No message attached! Please resend.
Thnkyou.
Honest work.
Truth is, it is hard to come by. Harder to keep. No matter how sweet the dream, how intense the effort. You may have lofty goals of being an office administrator when you are six years old, but there are only so many offices in the world. If of an entrepreneurial bent, you could open your own office to administer, buy the stationery, create a filing system, but you need the lesser roles of management in order to give your dream substance. You’ll need money to hire a university graduate who knows how to speak in the diarrhoeal verbosity of someone with a library full of tomes such as ‘Take Your Cheese and Shove it’, or, ‘the Lonely Life of the Long-distance Skyper’
As it is said, “The devil makes work for idle hands”. He did. It’s called email. Sometimes I feel like the sum total of my professional life is clicking send, reply to all, please find document attached, warm regards… Of course, when I was a child, there was no email- no personal computer either- so it is fair that my pre-adolescent dreams of finding the fossilised skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the back garden seemed realistic. If you’d told me I’d be spending my days shooting messages down cables, I would have laughed so loud it would have drowned out the Buck Rogers re-runs on the technicolour television.
Something I still don’t get about text messages and emails- you confirm receipt, and then the other person sends a message thanking you for the confirmation of receipt, and then you thank them for their confirmation of your confirmation. Where does it end? By the time of the second confirmation, you usually need to correct something in the original email, so it starts all over again… There should be a polite way of saying ENOUGH! THIS CONVERSATION IS HEREBY DEAD!
I can’t be alone in trying to deal with emails over the weekend- to come into work on a Monday morning and find an intray with 20, 30, 40 emails is unnerving. You can spend the entire day confirming this, cc’ing that. I suppose the expression ‘going postal’ refers to the way all the paper mail used to arrive in the mail sorting office on a Monday, sending the post guy off the deep end. Now we all have the luxury of having our own post offices, and the opportunity to go off the deep end on our own.
And no matter how hard you read what you’ve just typed, the law of email states that after seeing the confirmation message ‘sent’ you will notice the most glaring of errors- misspelling of names, nonsense words like thnkyou, or warm regrads… It’s the curse. The devil has you on his chain gang, and you’ll never escape.
Please find the attached document with information on how to break free.
No message attached! Please resend.
Thnkyou.
Posts
Didn't you know that the e in email is for evil?
ReplyDelete@TBFKAMP: Or: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil, ja.
ReplyDeleteMwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa...
ReplyDeleteDude, I so get you on the reply that simply says "thanks". It infuriates me, and people do it on text and on email.
@angel: Thanks.
ReplyDeleteMwaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
ReplyDelete