Doing What You're Telling People Not To Do In Order To Tell Them Not To Do It

When I first started my job at the college back in 1997 it took about 3 weeks for my computer to arrive.
In order to get any work done I had to make use of my boss’ computer whenever he was away, or else go up to the art lab and use one of the student workstations, as they had all of the software I needed for my job.
This meant that I didn’t have a lot of free time for things like Web surfing and e-mail.
At the time I had something of a modern-day pen pal relationship carried on mostly via e-mail, so when I got home from my first day at work, I checked my mail and found a message from my friend bemoaning the fact that she hadn’t gotten a message from me all day and concluding that “maybe taking this new job wasn’t such a good idea after all.”
She was joking, of course, but it comes to mind as I consider how lax I’ve been in posting here.
Unfortunately, unlike the e-mail situation in that job (and my friend’s eagerness to receive messages from me), I don’t foresee that changing any time soon.
Not much of note happened today anyway, though, oddly enough, the one interesting thing that did happen actually relates to e-mail.
Sometime over the weekend some employee decided to try out his new e-mail account by sending out a test e-mail.
To everyone in the company.
Naturally, many people, confused as to who this person was and why they were receiving the e-mail sent out a response asking “Who are you and why are you sending me this?” or words to that effect.
Of course, they didn’t just hit “Reply” when sending this message, and instead hit “Reply All,” which meant that all employees had yet another pointless e-mail wending their way towards their inboxes.
A lot of people did this before (and even after) someone finally got sick of getting all of the e-mails and did a “Reply All” saying “Don’t ‘Reply All’ on this message.”
All told, there were 114 pointless messages waiting for me when I got in this morning.
This sort of thing used to happen at AOL all the time. It was almost comforting to be on such familiar ground.