14 May 2015
Male and email
by Chin Chin
The experts all seem to agree. Time spent looking at emails is reducing British productivity. It is bad for health and family life too, with the checking of inboxes whilst on holidays being labelled “sick” by Sir Cary Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University.
I expect that is only the half of the story and that there is an effect on the nation’s blood pressure as well. Try talking to a teenager who has a mobile phone to hand. Once upon a time, they could only show their irritation by looking out of the window, something so obviously rude that you could resort to shouting, or violence or throwing them out of the house or one of those other remedies so beloved by books on parenting. Now however it is different. “No, Dad, I am listening but I just need to deal with this text at the same time. Of course I can do two things at once. I’m not stupid, you know.” Never mind that the examiners thought different; never mind that successive schools gave up in disgust; the picture is one of modern progressive youth confronting an aged dinosaur, and a dinosaur with high blood pressure to boot.
But a surfeit of emails is not just a risk to the nation’s health. It also changes the function of the emails themselves. They cease to be a form of communication and become a way of covering the backside should things go wrong – rather like the risk warnings in a company prospectus. You know the system there. On about page 200, after 25 anodyne warnings of the “investors are reminded that markets can go down as well as up” variety you come across warning 26: “the main market for the Company’s credit insurance product is Greece, where results might be affected by financial instability”. Perfect! The investor who did not read this far has only himself to blame but not many investors will actually be put off because they won’t get to it. The public has been warned but not warned, as it were.
You can achieve much the same effect with an email to your boss, assuming he is the sort who receives too many of them, that is. Wait for a day when he is particularly busy, ideally with a lunch with someone rather attractive thrown in. Then write a long wordy email in adminspeak which wanders about aimlessly for several paragraphs and explains the decision you want covered at page three. End it with the words “Let me know if you have a problem with this” and fire it off just before his luncheon appointment. Job done. Your decision won’t be challenged but, should it go pear shaped, you put on your most innocent expression and exclaim: “But I checked with you; don’t you read your emails?”
Most of us get too many emails but our problems are put in perspective by the owner of a software company who claimed to receive a daily dose of about 3000. How did he deal with them without going mad? Simple, he deleted all of them all unread on arriving the office. As he put it, “anyone who wants me to read their message had better write me a letter.” For his staff to send him an email was a sackable offence.
For those who work for themselves or in small groups, the internal email is less of a problem. Here stress levels are maintained in quite a different way – by the use of passwords to cover every bit of usable technology. In a big office there will be an IT department to deal with this but, if you are responsible for your own computer, navigating the passwords is about as easy as finding your way out of the minotaur’s lair. You begin by choosing the password to your computer itself. All the books say that you mustn’t write it down, so it has to be something you can remember . You remember reading the Lord of the Rings and the message “Speak, friend and enter” over the door to Khazad-dûm. The password there was “friend” of course; so you decide to follow the same logic and make yours “password”.
So far so good in rather an inbred sort of way but it doesn’t solve everything because you also need passwords for Microsoft, the i-cloud, your website and many other things – including the local theatre. Presumably the latter is to guard against the risk that a fugitive from justice will ring up, book tickets in your name, pay for them with his own credit card and sit incognito in your seat, thus cleverly laundering his identity. Anyway you come up with the brilliant scheme of always using the word “password” and following it with a letter of the alphabet. That works well until you discover that some of the passwords need a capital letter. Very well, those ones can begin “Password”; then there are others which need a number, OK “Password 1,2 etc”. Others require a symbol: “Password b5£”. Other sites will reject even this password as “weak”, presumably as a way of demonstrating the sort of bare chested virility more commonly associated with a Russian leader. By the end you give up completely and start your use of each program by going through the forgotten password procedure. That really knocks your productivity for six.
It is worse, of course, if there are a few of you working together and you decide to operate a common website. Someone has to be the administrator and will have control of the linked emails and passwords. Not being a natural at computers you appoint a colleague. In you go next morning to look at your emails and out you are duly bounced. Wrong password! You try “Password a 3” but that doesn’t get you in; then “Password b 4 £”. No again! Did the £ sign come before the number or was that something you tried as extra security on your bank account? Try again. Oops, you are locked out. The administrator is out of the office travelling abroad but you know his password to the website controls because he wrote it down on that post-it note stuck to his screen; so you sit down, log in as him and find the administration page. Now it is important to keep things straight if you are not going to get into a muddle. For the next ten minutes you are him and using his password. Like any great actor you need to get into character. Perhaps it would be easier if you slipped on the jacket which he left over his chair and whistled his favourite tune.
Vastly pleased with your thoroughness, you sit whistling at his keyboad and login using his username and password. Perfect, you are through to the administration page. Now, remember that you are him and, as him, change your email password. No, not that one idiot, that’s his. You are only him for certain purposes. Never mind it can be changed back. Ah, but what to? The password on the screen gets him into the website management but not into his email. Well, as administrator you can give him a new email password. Stick that on the screen too and tell everyone in the office that if he rings they are to tell him what it is. Receiving emails in Azerbaijan is not particularly easy but it is more difficult still if someone has changed your password.
Hmm, perhaps that wasn’t perfect but at least you can get your emails. All goes well until the end of the day when you arrive home to discover that you are still wearing his jacket rather than yours and that you left your house keys in your left hand jacket pocket.
Unlike emails, passwords have been with us for a long time and you wonder how it worked in Roman times. When a Roman centurion, returning to camp from a drunken night out in honour of Bacchus found that he couldn’t remember the password and tried “Ave Caesar” , was he met with the reply “No, its Ave underscore Caesar, you enemy spy!” followed by a fatal spear thrust. No, I suppose not. Passwords were easier then. Perhaps that’s as well. After all the penalty for forgetting them was immeasurably higher.
