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Super Secret Agent Spy

I am a writer. And a doodler. And an eater of Twizzlers. And the mother of MuShu, the wonder puppy. I love long walks on the beach, fast cars, fine din. . .whoops. Wrong website. . ....

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Don't Send it in an E-Mail!

We’ve been playing this game at work for the past two weeks. It’s called “How Many 13 Hour Days Can You Work in a Row Before Your Left Eye Starts to Twitch Uncontrollably and you Attack the Kids in the Mail Room with a Machete?”

It’s really a fun game. You should try it some time.

Sure. I know. I know. Some former Countrywide or Lehman Brothers employee is out there tsk-tsking me asserting that I should be thankful that I, in these trying economic times, have a job at all. The fact of the matter is, I’m not really bitching. We’re actually having a good time.

Well. . . I guess I shouldn’t say we’re having a good time, but we are making the best of a HORRID situation.

And thanks to the fact that people still don’t quite grasp the concept that “deleting” an e-mail doesn’t really mean it’s gone, we’ve been able to wrangle some pretty sizable chuckles out of this situation. . .

A little back-ground, if you will:

Most of you know that my “Clark Kent” job is working as a paralegal. As with any job, the workload rises and falls throughout the year. Recently, our caseload has been saturated with some rather high-dollar cases, all following the same arc by way of timeline. One “large” case is tough enough; pile four more on top of that – all having the same deadlines, a bajillion involved parties. . .and things can get tricky. And stressful.

What I’m working on this week is what is known as “e-discovery.”  While e-mail has certainly greased the wheels in the world at large, it has bogged down due process. 

See, the problem is, our client is a large company, but not large enough to have an IT team who can extract the e-mails related ONLY to this project. Thus, we were handed every e-mail that was exchanged within this company for the past two years. After weeks of waiting for our “expert” to process and “deduplicate” these e-mails, we were each given a list of hyper links to e-mails to review.

I was assigned 47,000 e-mails to review.

And let me tell you something, people. . .in case you didn’t already know. . .

DO NOT USE YOUR OFFICE E-MAIL TO SEND E-MAILS OF A PERSONAL NATURE

And by personal, I don’t mean “Honey, please remember to pick up some toilet paper or else we’ll be wiping our butts with Kleenex again.  .  .”

I mean:

*. . .if you got drunk at made out with your cousin; don’t send it in an e-mail.

*. . .if you think a female (or male, I guess) co-worker is attractive and claim that you’ve “hit that” and left her with a “sticky face” after a bottle of wine; don’t send it in an e-mail.

*.  . .if you are an incredibly racist jerk-off who hates “mexicans” and “the blacks”; don’t send it in an e-mail.

*. . .if you are a male chauvinist pig he-whore and use phrases such as “I tagged and bagged two bitches this weekend without even leaving my apartment”; don’t send it in an e-mail.

*. . .if thinking about your boyfriend puts you in a condition of. . .ummm. . .errr. . .dampness and you want to tell him about it; don’t send it in an e-mail.

*. . .if said boyfriend reads your e-mail and it puts him in a condition of. . .ummm. . .errr. . .stiffness, tell him NOT to send that information in an e-mail.

At least, not your corporate e-mail.

And why not?

Because some day, somewhere, someone like me will be staring at a computer screen for the 12th hour of the day, her left eye twitching, and, upon finding your e-mail, will copy and send it around to other members of the e-mail review team (Who each have 50,000 or so of their own e-mails to read). We will all take a break, in the name of (in)sanity, and laugh about your horrible personality, nasty language or cry over your racist attitude. We will cease using your name in identification areas of  a spreadsheet and instead, call you names like “cousin kisser”, “He-Ho One,” “He-Ho Two,” “Pig Man” and “Grand Wizard of the KKK.”

Not only will we call you these names, but we will, until our work load lightens, curse you for abusing the e-mail system of your company. We will damn you for adding ONE MORE e-mail to the long list of e-mails that we must review. And should we ever meet you in person, we will NOT buy you a beer. (Or we will. We’ll just do something nasty to it before handing it over to you. I wonder how the spit of two paralegals and five attorneys would affect the flavor of a nice, solid lager?)

THIS is what I’ve been missing all of my Skirters for. I haven’t been able to indulge in the pleasure of stopping to read about what my favorite ladies (and one running guy in a skirt) are up to! Miss reading about you all! Will try to catch  up later.

Until then, please. . .keep your e-mails CLEAN.

xoxo