You've got mail

Reaching position number four on our list of prominent designers we find a Spaniard, Juan de la Cierva y Codorniú (1895 – 1935). This great engineer faced the problem of designing a rotorwing aircraft with self sustaining capability (autogyro) that he made in 1922 in his first prototype, the C-1. After several unsuccessful models, C-4 flied successfully flew in January 1924 in Getafe’s airfield, piloting Lieutenant Alejandro Gómez Spencer. In later models he introduced the flapping hinges to avoid the asymmetric lift by the rotor. In 1925 after a successful show in England with the C-6 model, he started the Cierva Autogyro Company Ltd. to manufacture his aircrafts. The implementation of his innovations contributed significantly to the development of the helicopter.

                              

Therefore I grant La Cierva with my number 4.

This week we will relax a little bit and talk about how technology affects our daily work and our customs and behavior. Today we will think about the e-mail.

The development of the IT (information technology) has enabled us to use some tools that twenty years ago would have sound like science fiction. From the development of the Internet up to the social networks, everything has supposed a hand full of new opportunities. From my personal point of view not all of them may have directly influenced your daily activity, but if I had to choose just one, I consider the email the most important.

Email has turned into an indispensable element of our personal life, but especially at work. Nowadays we cannot imagine our daily activity without the use of the electronic mail. But this, like everything else, has an evil side that makes us hate who invented it.

There are several kinds of characteristic mails, some of which we present here:

• “The informative mail” where you are invited to a meeting that has already been held

• “The festivity mail” where they inform you that a female colleague is going to have a baby, as if you wouldn’t have realized that she was pregnant

• “The lazy mail” sent by your lazy colleague that shares cubicle with you in order to ask you anything that he could have asked just rising his ass from his chair and talking to you

• “The 666 mail” sent by your boss at 6pm, with a 6 Megabyte specification and with the intent to have your comments before 6 am because he has a business trip and in  the airplane he will be out of range

• “The Minutes of the Meeting mail” which is what someone you don’t know sends  you, but contains certain actions that you should have taken as a result of a meeting you never got invited to

• “The someone has a problem mail” in which a large group of people, all copied in the mail’s distributor, are telling each other that there is a problem that has to be solved, with the hope that someone takes the bait and decides that he has to solve it

• “The complaint mail” in which someone very upset demands you an answer to an email that you did not receive because he wrote your email address wrong

• “The supplier’s mail” which confirms your registration in a seminar, although you didn’t even know about this seminar

• “The daily mail” which is  sent by the direction board every day in order to communicate the whole company that a lot of new urgent rules have been issued either for Safety and Hygiene, for parking accommodation or may be for the new canteen schedule

• “The don’t ask me mail” in which someone that you had asked for an important information for your job answers you that this is not his duty and that it would be better to ask someone in the department next to you

• "The department next to you mail” in which the responsible person for the mentioned department tells you that what you are asking for is not his duty either and kindly redirects you to the “don’t ask me” guy.

• “The FYI mail” which is not a simple onomatopoeia for the mail’s speed (sound like ti in Spanish), but only a way of distributing any irrelevant information.

• “The It was not me mail” which is the answer mail of someone that you had informed about a problem

• “The long weekend mail” in which the Program Manager tells you that the extra day you wanted to have free for spending a long weekend cannot be granted due to “the program requirements”

• “The funny mail” which is written to you by the same Program Manager that rejected your free day for the long weekend, from the beach  the same day you had asked to have free, remembering you, that after the long weekend you have to speak about some very important issue

We could go on for hours but I guess that all of you know very well what I am talking about right now. The mail is considered a basic tool in the actual professional world mainly due to the immediacy and, of course, its undeniable utility. But when it is used as an aggression element it can be very harmful to normal people, so I consider that Geneva’s convention should register it as a massive destruction weapon in certain cases.

The technological progress by itself is neither good nor bad. It gives us certain tools that intelligently used help us in our work and free us from certain tasks that otherwise would be repetitive and annoying, but used incorrectly these tools can turn into something abominable that oppresses our existence.

This is exactly what makes that the email in the hands of someone that hasn’t anything to say, turns into spam and that’s something we really should think about.

Anyway, even if you would try to rationalize the use of the email, the rest of your organization, which mainly do not read this blog, won’t do it.  So, we will give you some self-defense basics that we could consider the “golden rules” for the perfect mail user:

• Make sure that the number of addressees of the mail never exceeds the number of employees of the company as this could be considered arrogant

• The longer your mail the more important it will seem. If you believe that it is not long enough, remember that you have always the option to attach a file. Considering the length and the previous rule, you will get anyone to read it

• Try to not answer any mail directly. Forward it always first to your workgroup or even better to your whole area, but be careful and never go beyond rule number one

• In mail chains that could be considered as “The someone has a problem mail” type answer to issues raised at least three levels prior to the actual one, and if possible increasing the number of addressees. In this case you can always say that you did not have the latest information

• When you want to catch the attention, write in capital letters, it will seem that you are shouting and therefore you will be more right

• In all your mails copy your boss. He probably won’t be interested at all, but you will saturate his mailbox

• When you have little to say in your mail and you do not reach the minimum size mentioned above, use a font size of 14 and double space after the full stops. This will give you a touch of distinction

You have been warned!

A thought:

When you have no idea of what you are doing, try doing it in a clean and organized way.

See you

Be brave!



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