No this is not a new virus warning or hacker attack. This is about communication pollution by self-centered inconsiderate technocrats. Have you ever opened your incoming email box to find 100 emails from the same person? Talk about abuse right?
For all of you out there who are guilty of this (and you know who you are) shame on you. Learn how to communicate and stop being so annoying!
I call this Swarm Email and it gets on my nerves maybe it does to you too. Why? Because it wastes my time. Now I have to deal with every cotton picking message. It’s so painful it makes me considered deleting them all. Especially because of the nonsensical and broken sentence structure (let’s not forget an overload of cut and paste). Would you believe I get this drivel from authors who write books? What has happened to clean clear concise communication?
One method of dealing with Swarm Email is to chuck the whole group of messages into a folder with the person’s name on it. It is so nice having a clean inbox and the Swarm Email is tucked neatly away in a sort of Email Purgatory.
I know why some people do this. I think it is because they desperately need to get every unfocused crumb of thought off their plate. I know this because I occasional get this reply; “I already sent you an email about this.” Oh really? Now I have to go look in the dumpster for it. Maybe I should challenge you to verify that you actually sent it so that you too can dance in the rubble with me. No, please just send me a hundred more emails, I love the attention.
I have nothing against iPhones, but only in the way people use them. I seem to get much better email messages from Blackberry users. Ever since the iPhone first came out I would start seeing emails with nothing in them. Oh wait! The message was in the Subject Line. How convenient. Except the sentence gets cut off because of the character limit. So what were you trying to say?
This brave new world of smart phones and iPads seems to be killing communication itself when it was suppose to enhance. It’s not the technology. It’s the laziness of people. Communication is so accessible that we have lost the will to perfect the message. It makes me exhausted having to communicate back all of the time; “What do you mean?”, “Can you be more specific?” or “Why is this relevant?”.
Perhaps communication is a lost art an has gone the way of the quill pen. Is this a pet peeve of yours? Or am I the only one that gets Swarm Email?
