Email

One of the most essential forms of communications in this era is the Email. It has clearly crossed the line from being a "useful communication tool" to Mission Critical Communication Platform and a De-facto Information Repository. Take away email, and an employee's ability to send forwards and communicate, collaborate n coordinate (whats with all the co* words??) with customers, vendors, fellow employees and others is severely hampered, the former issue leading to severe cases of nerve damage due to proffessional trauma and cerebral inactivity. In fact, overall productivity is reduced. Phrases like "Email's down, I might as well go home" are not all that uncommon, you know.

A click of a button and a person thousands of miles away is a privy to your thoughts. Its fast, reasonably safe and comparitively cheap. And for a s/w engineer, like me, it is an integral, indispensable, indelible, inalienable, inalterable, inarguable, incessant, inconvertible and inbuilt(OK enough ins) part of work. Coz most communication in a project happens through mails. (Lets keep it for a later post, why I think Lotus Notes/Microsoft Outlook, MS word and MS Excel are THE most important tools for project development n execution in any technology/domain)

Did u hear the story of a software engineer who was marooned on an island for a long period and then one fine day a gorgeous blonde comes over from the other side of the island and displays how she applied her skills to produce some of the most amazing things one could expect to find in such a desreted place. And then when she tells him, with a suggestive wink, that he could turn his wildest fantasy into reality he is overjoyed at the thought of being able to check his mails. :-)

Well so much for the email fondness. Now on an average one must be sending out atleast 30 mails a day, and that is a conservative estimate. If you happen to be a Project Leader, Project/Account Manager or any branch higher in the corporate tree, then sending out mails is perhaps all you do the whole day, with the notable exception of holding meetings on project issues, Six Sigma, Change Management and other such efficient time wasting subjects. In such a case, the figure assumes epidemic proportions, often leading to huge network traffic accompanied by crashing of mail servers. I dont even want to guess. Some email bloopers that we regularly commit

1 Please revert back ...
Yessss I will revert 'back'... since I cant revert forward... guess I dont have much of a choice, do I?
2 Please find attached herewith...
Oh it is attached herewith??? I thought it was attached to the tree outside... or maybe the commode, where all shit coming from you rightfully belongs..

3 Where can I find these Apples?
This one is a jewel ...was the subject of the mail ...it was a laugh riot in the team while the lady was actually asking where she she could find the Applets

Now there is a little bit of personal touch involved with our email ids.. the official protocals of any corporate house dont leave much room for creativity with stringent rules like <firstname>.<lastname>@your-sweatshop.com or the other way around...But for the personal mails, one can come up with a sea of imaginable n unimaginable ids...Often we see birthdates, zodiac sign, pet names and stuff like that in ids... which give u as much idea about the person as id such as WellHungGuy or SexyEyeCandyBabe...

Emails have progressed tremendously over the years. A measely 2 Mb account 5-7 years ago to huge 2 Gb accounts now... I started off in 1999 with a petty 5 Mb account in Yahoo (hence lalitsingh99, which has stuck with me eversince) and still feel content with the space n features it offers and dont feel the need to switch.
Some things just get better with age!!!