Review - Pandora's Click

Review - Pandora's Click

 

By Janet Malcolm Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home by
David Shipley and Will Schwalbe Knopf, 247 pp., $19.95
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20571

 

To say that Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home is more a
users' manual than a book is not to belittle it. Email is like an appliance
that we have been helplessly misusing because it arrived without
instructions. Thanks to David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, our blind
blunderings are over. With Shipley and Schwalbe's excellent instructions in
hand we can email as confidently as we load the dishwasher and turn on the
microwave.

 

Shipley and Schwalbe are not exaggerating when they say that their guide is
essential. For, in truth, email is more like a dangerous power tool than
like a harmless kitchen appliance. The more skillful (or lucky) among us
have escaped serious injury, but many, perhaps most, of us have suffered the
equivalent of burns, lost fingers, electric shocks, and bone fractures.
Incautious emailing has cost jobs, ruined friendships, threatened marriages,
subverted projects, even led to jail time. "On email, people aren't quite
themselves," Shipley and Schwalbe write. "They are angrier, less
sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and
duplicitous. Email has a tendency to encourage the lesser angels of our
nature." It also has the capacity for instant retribution. In one of their
cautionary illustrations, Shipley and Schwalbe hold up an email exchange
between an executive and a secretary at a large American company in China.
The executive nastily wrote:

 

You locked me out of my office this evening because you assume I have my
office key on my person. With immediate effect, you do not leave the office
until you have checked with all the managers you support.

 

The secretary wrote back:

 

I locked the door because the office has been burgled in the past. Even
though I'm your subordinate, please pay attention to politeness when you
speak. This is the most basic human courtesy. You have your own keys. You
forgot to bring them, but you still want to say it's someone else's fault.

 

She then performed the two-click operation that sent copies of her and her
boss's emails to the entire staff of the company. Before long the exchange
appeared in the Chinese press and led to the executive's resignation.

 

Another anecdote that Shipley and Schwalbe tell to illustrate email's
special killer combination of winking at our bad behavior and horribly
punishing us for it also involves a boss and secretary. In this case, the
secretary spilled ketchup on the boss's trousers, and he wrote an email
asking for the £4 it cost to have the trousers cleaned (the company was a
British law firm). Receiving no reply, he pursued the matter. Finally he --
and hundreds of people at the firm -- received this email:

 

Subject: Re: Ketchup trousers

 

With reference to the email below, I must apologize for not getting back to
you straight away but due to my mother's sudden illness, death and funeral I
have had more pressing issues than your £4.

 

I apologize again for accidentally getting a few splashes of ketchup on your
trousers. Obviously your financial need as a senior associate is greater
than mine as a mere secretary.

 

Having already spoken to and shown your email...to various partners, lawyers
and trainees..., they kindly offered to do a collection to raise the £4.

 

I however declined their kind offer but should you feel the urgent need for
the £4, it will be on my desk this afternoon. Jenny.

 

Again, the exchange found its way into the press--and thus into Send. But
Shipley and Schwalbe hardly needed to scour newspaper archives for examples
of email's destructive power. How many of us have--among other
self-immolations--badmouthed someone in an email, only to make the fatal
mis-click that sends the email to the very person we have betrayed? And what
can we do to repair the damage? Anything?

 

to continue reading, click http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20571



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