The Office Jester… every office needs one act out email at work in real life
Oh…emails! How we have come to loathe them. There was a time when they were celebrated for simplifying work. Now, other tools have simplified work further which has resulted in emails becoming relatively obsolete. In reality, the role of emails has changed. They were tools for organising and project management when new. They’re now relegated to just being communication tools.
Numerous studies have found that one of the most time consuming (read, time wasting) activities at work these days is sorting through inboxes and checking emails. In fact, most forward-looking businesses have started trying to find ways and means to cut down their employees’ email time. Task management web applications are more in vogue these days.
If you actually come to analyse them, emails at work have taken on many strange characteristics. These characteristics are just not evident to us because we always view emails within the email context. If we were to only change our perspective and read emails while imagining how they’ll look in the real world, we’ll see how absurd we’ve become in writing them. Here’s a video that takes email at work and enacts it in the real world.
Email at Work in the Real World
Digital in the real is always funny whether it is Skype calls, text speak, conference meetings, or emails. The manner in which we communicate through technology is quite obnoxious if compared to the real world. Generalisation is the name of the game when it comes to the email at work. The quality that they were praised for has become the hilarious aspect of emails. Consider the scenarios this video has taken.
- Auto response: This is as generic as things get. Person sets auto response and goes on vacation. Person comes back but forgets to turn it off. The longer the auto response is on, the funnier it is. In this video, it is “two days ago”. We have personally seen a whole week. The person whose email had it on for a week is now known as the Lazy Lard in some circles.
- Reply all function: This is also about being lazy but it is less of a mistake and more of an established practice. Nobody checks who all have been included in an email. The automatic practice is to simply click “reply all” so people naturally end up thinking “why me?”
- Signatures: The practice is to include as much information in the automated signatures section as possible so as to make identification and response easier. However, some people really do take it very far. Soon enough, the entire family tree will be included in these things.
- Forgot to attach: This is the funniest and we’ve been culpable of this numerous times. Luckily, it is so common that we weren’t straddled with the nickname “Depattach Mode”. Check bands in the last century, if you didn’t get that one.
- All caps: Then, there are the usual chat faux-pas of using all caps while typing. We don’t understand how the entire concept of ‘if you’re using all caps, you’re shouting’ came about. Did someone just invent it out of the blue only to see it get stuck amongst the internet denizens?
- Parents’ video: The retiree’s curse of being so incredibly bored that all you can do is watch cat videos and share it with your children. This can be very annoying especially if you get an email at work but you should cut them some slack you know. Perhaps, making your own YouTube channel and sharing videos of you eating your meals will get your mother off all the cat videos on YouTube?
- Nigerian guy: The Nigerian guy is simply adorable in this video. Everything from the phrasing (“friend”) to the accent is good. We will never read those “I have money for you” emails the same way again.
- Nurse: Ahem::cough::Ahem saw such an email at work. Ahem::cough::Ahem
- Administrator: Is it our misconception or does the system administrator looks like Agents from the Matrix series?
- Circular disclosure: The Circular Disclosure is a legal thing. Legal things are always funny. Some legal things are ridiculous too, like lawyers.
- Mistaken inclusion: Blame the auto-complete for this. You have more than a single person with the same name on your contacts list and you have made this mistake. Including an unintended party into a string of emails can be quite embarrassing. It’s never happened to us, you know, but we understand the implications… quite well (sheepish smile).
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