Email Confessions
So NPR is running a series on email tips designed to reduce email in the workplace. There was cost estimates for email services in the billions of dollars. I of all people felt bad. Why? Well they mentioned Microsoft Outlook (a product I worked on a long time ago) by name. This leads me to a little story of fixing bugs. I remember very clearly working late after having eaten Indian food brought in by work (I wonder if that particular meal was the one my boss made fun of us for not knowing how to eat Indian food. Whatever, I still dip my naan.) and late that evening I had an easy bug to fix. The header string for replies and forwards that says, "-----[Original Message]-----" wasn't right. The correct string wasn't listed in the bug record so I had to make it up and yes I'm the guy who typed that. The bug said to reformat the string and add the square brackets, but it didn't say how many dashes to have. So being a human being who hasn't had the unfortunate happenstance (I love that word) to lose any digits in a farming accident, I pretty much decided to go with 5. In my defense there were no Program Managers around having done the standard PM "Eat and Leave" move that they were so famous for during what we started calling, "Dev Dinners." Thus I take full responsibility for my actions.
10 Dashes. What if I had used 4 on each side for a total of 8? Now multiply that 10 by all the times you yourself hit reply or forward in a day. Now take that number and multiply it by the number of users using Microsoft Outlook to reply and forward plain text or rtf email messages. (Sorry to be so precise but the string isn't used when you're forwarding rich HTML messages anymore. We're doing math here, OK?) That's a fuck ton of dashes. (A new unit of measure!)
Fuck Ton. Now let's realize that every character that is stored and transmitted by your email server costs some amount money. Not zero money. Not like big money, but some money. Now take that small yet positive number and multiply by our Fuck Ton (FT from now on) FT of dashes. Holy shit batman. I feel responsible for all that money. All that loss of GNP. (That's Gross National Product for those following along at home.) I could be responsible for the whole housing crisis because I chose 5 dashes instead of 4. How do I get up in the morning? How can I look in the mirror? How can I look my children in the eye?
10 Dashes. What if I had used 4 on each side for a total of 8? Now multiply that 10 by all the times you yourself hit reply or forward in a day. Now take that number and multiply it by the number of users using Microsoft Outlook to reply and forward plain text or rtf email messages. (Sorry to be so precise but the string isn't used when you're forwarding rich HTML messages anymore. We're doing math here, OK?) That's a fuck ton of dashes. (A new unit of measure!)
Fuck Ton. Now let's realize that every character that is stored and transmitted by your email server costs some amount money. Not zero money. Not like big money, but some money. Now take that small yet positive number and multiply by our Fuck Ton (FT from now on) FT of dashes. Holy shit batman. I feel responsible for all that money. All that loss of GNP. (That's Gross National Product for those following along at home.) I could be responsible for the whole housing crisis because I chose 5 dashes instead of 4. How do I get up in the morning? How can I look in the mirror? How can I look my children in the eye?
posted by J.R. at 9:47 AM
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