Disregard the title under the byline here.
I'm no longer an editor; I'm an e-mail processor.
The coupling of the internet and instantaneous interpersonal communication was originally touted as a universal blessing.
But for many of us, e-mail has become a curse—and yet a necessary evil. It is simultaneously a time-saver and a time-waster.
To wit: During a recent week's stay abroad on business, I found myself inadvertently locked out of my company's e-mail network. The following Monday was entirely devoted to slogging through the result of that glitch: 417 unanswered e-mails. Mind you, this flood came undaunted by the automatic feature that tells the sender the recipient is out of pocket and cannot respond to the missive.
Even cherry-picking past the spam—that is supposed to be filtered out but never really is—takes all day. And it still takes time simply to delete the unsolicited offers for mortgage refinancing, weight loss, and, yes, even pornography. Opening up the legit stuff—press releases, article submissions, queries for information, correspondents' stories, and announcements of meetings and press briefings—takes even more time, but that's part of the job.
Yet we can't live without e-mail today. It does save time in interpersonal communications. When one is already multitasking like an octopus on am- phetamines juggling chainsaws and bowling balls, the avoidance of meetings, chitchat, and the usual hemming and hawing that comes with "face time" can be a huge relief—even, regrettably, at the erosion of the "personal" in interpersonal. And it especially helps avoid the torturous frustration of Telephone Tag.
OGJ editors have masochistically put themselves in the role of enablers to the compulsive e-mailers: We slap our e-mail addresses right after our names on the magazine's masthead. And at the bottom of our bylined online news stories. And posted on the web site. Unlike a long-distance phone call or a mailed or couriered document, all that's needed to zap that riposte, diatribe, or general condemnation of an editor's intellect, character, and lineage to us via e-mail is a handful of electrons that comes as close to free as any commodity.
Weird e-mail
We're fair game. So it gets pretty weird sometimes, as the following examples attest:
The Chinese puzzle. There's the person who occasionally sends e-mails filled with nothing but Chinese ideograms and a sprinkling of numbers. After months of these, I still don't know if these are righteous fodder for editorial purposes, grocery lists, or ransom notes.
"The Prize," Reader's Digest condensed version. There are the requests for information that can range from a kid asking us, essentially, to do his homework for him to brainbusters such as, "Is there an oil crisis or isn't there? I found a web site that says there is. What do you say?"
In such an instance one must choose between brevity that comes off as rude (somehow just saying "No" doesn't suffice) and gamely making a stab at answering the question. Well, after 500 words or so, that's 15 minutes of my life I'll never get back.
Fun with wannabe terrorist-hackers. A recent, eminently publishable article from a well-known name in this industry came with attachments that were odious screeds against certain groups and vicious verbal attacks and threats upon the US and its citizens, ostensibly from one of the few members of the Osama bin Laden fan club. It was immediately obvious to us that this junk snagged like cockleburrs, via a hacker's internet-spread virus, onto to the sender's e-mail. But upon alerting him, the prospective author was horrified and went to great length to disassociate himself with the unwelcome riders. Not to worry.
The psychic e-mail. An activist group sent us e-mails decrying ExxonMobil Corp.'s then-pending announcement related to what was then a still-unidentified climate change initiative (a $100 million commitment to fund climate change research at Stanford University, as it turned out). This group offered to tell "the other side of the story"—the day before ExxonMobil was to make its announcement. The other side of a story that was yet to be told?
Boon for the weary editor
Finally, there is the ultimate boon from e-mail for a weary editor. For years, the bane of my existence had been the multiple daily phone calls from public relations specialists asking if I had received their press release, sent by fax, mail, courier, or carrier pigeon. (How tempting was a rude response.)
E-mail management software nowadays offers a feature that quickly lets the sender know if the intended recipient received it and even opened and read it. Said pestering phone calls have dried to a relative trickle.
If I've offended any PR reps, please don't call to complain.
Just send me an e-mail.
