An Experiment in Scotch

Have you ever watched some­one repeat­edly do some­thing over and over again even though it didn’t do what he thought it did? Like in The Princess Bride when Vizzini kept say­ing things were incon­ceiv­able even though those very things had already in fact hap­pened and thus, could not by any def­i­n­i­tion of the word be con­sid­ered incon­ceiv­able? Have you ever seen that to hap­pen in real life? For the most part, I think it never hap­pens (evo­lu­tion kinda pre­vents it, long term speak­ing and all) but there is one event, one thing that is so hor­rif­i­cally mis­used that reams of Inter­net bits have been spewed forth about its mis­use and still, the despi­ca­ble behav­ior lives on, in appar­ent infamy.

It must be a sign of my impend­ing descent into senil­ity and gen­eral all around crotch­ety­ness but peo­ple who hit reply to all when in fact they shouldn’t be hit­ting reply to all at all cause me a great deal of con­ster­na­tion. I spent a full 20 min­utes today try­ing to fig­ure out what in the world makes peo­ple do this thing, this reply to all with a sin­gle word that can’t pos­si­bly be intended for every­one. Seri­ously. I sat there, try­ing to explain a behav­ior that is inex­plic­a­ble (mmm smells like irony). I’m los­ing it. Do they need val­i­da­tion that they exist (“Look, I’m alive!”)? Is it more sin­is­ter (“I’m more impor­tant than every­one else on the email chain!”)? Is it less sin­is­ter (“There’s a Reply but­ton?!?”)? I asked these ques­tions over and over for 20 full min­utes. And I’m writ­ing a 500 word blog post about it. I AM los­ing it.

Look, email is almost ren­dered use­less as it is. I used to write long, won­der­fully explicit emails regard­ing best prac­tices and processes and gotchas until I real­ized that email is prob­a­bly irrev­o­ca­bly bro­ken, not to men­tion requires entirely too much atten­tion for the aver­age per­son to spend in one sit­ting these days. Not unlike my blog posts.

How­ever, you can do your part to make email use­ful again. It’s really easy. If you have a habit of hit­ting reply to all when you really ought to be hit­ting reply, take a deep breath, have a sip of scotch or cof­fee or arsenic and ask your­self if what you are about to say is really worth the 5 sec­onds of my life (and every other per­sons’ life on the email chain, hey I’m a hedo­nis­tic util­i­tar­ian if noth­ing else) that I’ll never get back after I read your email that I made the mis­take of think­ing might be impor­tant. It’s the least you can do.

[This post is writ­ten in honor of my friend, Nish, the world’s worst offender of the Reply To All but­ton though in her defense, what she usu­ally has to say is rel­e­vant to the con­ver­sa­tion at hand.]