There was a time, not too long ago, where sending information to someone was a feat. You would write a letter, find an envelope, lick a stamp, and physically exert yourself to walk to your mailbox. The physical work needed guaranteed that you wouldn’t waste your valuable words on nonsense replies.
“I just wanted to let you know I read your letter,” would have never been a sentence on its own merit.
Today? We live in a world of Reply All – a bottomless pit that spawns irrational overgrowth for every email sent.
Need to respond with high value information? Screw that, just reply with “Thanks,” or “Got it,” Something that was never done 15 years ago. Mine personally began on a Tuesday.
Tuesday. To be exact. Nothing about this Tuesday email conversation gave any indication that it would blossom into an epic of 73 messages that would span throughout 4 days while testing my already weak faith in mankind.
It began innocently enough. Our office manager, Barbara, decided to send out a company-wide email announcing the holiday party. Simple enough: The party will be December 15th at 7PM.
Business Casual attire, you can bring a plus one. Only 22 words. At most this would need you to put an event on your calendar and make a mental note.
What happened next can not be described without invoking the term ‘reply nonsense.’
Before I knew it, my inbox was being attacked by colleagues. First I received an email from Mark in accounting, “Will there be vegetarian options?” That’s perfectly fine to ask. But you didn’t need to send that to everyone.
From there the sentence began to branch off into everyone and their mother. Stephanie in Marketing replied to everyone letting us know that she was, “So excited!” Ugh. Followed by not one, not two, but four exclamation points.
This wasn’t enough for Michael in IT who decided to reply all with the thumbs up emoji. Because that really helped the other sixty-two busy days we have at work. Emily wanted to know if her plus one could include her dog.
Valid Question. But was also completely unnecessary to email me while I was buried in client emails and the quarterlies I was attempting to avoid. By 10: 30am I deleted an email from Josh that was sent to all staff asking “Does anyone know if there’s parking.”
There is a special circle in hell for that email.
What followed was beyond my comprehension. Every single new email I received was in reference to Barbara’s initial email. None of them had any beneficial use to my life.
Scrolling through my emails, there goes another notification. This is when things started to go downhill. Kevin in sales, astounded every one of his coworkers and REPLIED TO EVERYONE about how to remove himself from the email chain.
Kevin had just doomed us all. There was no winning against Kevin. Replying to him with “Please remove me from this thread” was the digital equivalent of throwing gas on a fire.
Almost instantly, three other colleagues hit “Reply All” to Kevin’s email with the same intentions as me. Then the good ones came in. “Guys stop Reply All-ing if you want to be taken off this thread!
!” They cried out, sending yet another unnecessary ‘reply all’ email. Listening to that string of emails bounce back and forth was insanity. By noon, the email chain had transformed into a creature of its own.
What was once a simple message about a holiday party had turned into:
Discussion on if we should offer remote work for the new year. Someone from HR decided that because cookies were mentioned, we should share recipes. Someone asked about a different deadline for an unrelated project.
Don’t-get-fired-Dave decided to share his vacation photos (sent as attachments to every email he would send on that thread.) Next thing you know, the email took on a life of it’s own and grew larger than our server. To make matters worse I left to grab lunch for about two hours to attend a client meeting.
Yes… when I got back I walked into that meeting having forty-seven emails accumulate in that thread. One email stood out to me as being the most hilarious read. It was from another coworker who accidentally forwarded that insanity email to another coworker trying to ask “what in the world is going on?” but accidentally hit Reply All.
What bothered me was how coworkers could exist in their own worlds. No one was paying attention to what the other was saying. Multiple conversations were happening at once.
It was the digital definition of a convo. The only thing they all had in common was the subject line: ‘Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Holiday Party Information (PLEASE STOP REPLYING ALL)’ which would change with every reply and seemed to grow more menacing with each person. Wednesday brought on a new type of email creature: The Reply All Savior.
Mass emails were sent containing sentiments such as ‘ PLEASE stop Reply Alling,’ ‘This has gotten too far,’ and my personal favorite…
‘Please only “Reply To” when you need to reply to everyone.’
Our hero had arrived courtesy of HR. Someone at HR spent five paragraphs telling everyone how to properly reply to emails. Literally every employee received an email telling us how to use email.
By Friday afternoon we were all finally able to stop the madness. Not because someone had the common sense to realize how absurd it had become. No, it was our IT department who installed a block on the employees who were still replying.
Instantly we received an email about why we were no longer able to reply which spawned another email thread. This story isn’t unique. Not by a long shot.
The Reply All button is evidence of humans improbable belief that their thoughts and ideas are worthy of being broadcasted to other busy individuals. Blind optimism if you will. Pushing the button is seeking validation by standing on a chair in a crowded theater and yelling you have to go to the bathroom.
Don’t get me wrong, there is more deeper issues with the “Reply All” button than sheer stupidity. What pains me is that we, as professionals, have lost the ability to have a civil conversation. It’s watching adults act like children that have just been handed a bullhorn.
What scares me is that the same people who operate trucks and negotiate million dollar accounts don’t know how to effectively email someone. And that’s when you lose all hope. Cue the email chain discussing the type of employees we are…
The Ghost- the coworker that never feels the need to ever hit reply to an email.
These people become the golden standard because we will never be able to achieve their level of indifference. The Historian- whose only job on the email chain is to notify everyone that this happened two years ago, sent an email from 2019. The Clown – tried in vain to use a Dwight Schrute meme thinking that a thread about tracked ink levels was appropriate enough to share dad jokes.
Don’t @ me with the memes became a trending topic. The Originator – replies to a simple statement with “This reminds me of…” and proceeds to tell a story that somehow receives another 10 people replying about something else. And my personal favorite, Dear Email Archaeologist, who replies to an email thread that has been dead for months by answering the first person’s question.
Acted like they were crawled out of the ocean with no cell service for the past year and decided to end the thread. I like to think I’ve gotten better at coping with the stress. Including but not limited to A List of email filters.
And what I like to call ‘mute this conversation.’ Nope, I’ve taken to ignoring the damn things. But I go back to my original point. Covering my eyes does nothing but give me the realization that I can’t live like this when there is a problem at hand that will never go away as long as we exist in a modern office.
The dreaded Reply All. I’ve seen some of my worse email battles. Like the time an employee forwarded their boss gossiping about how their day was.
His boss decided to reply to his email about how his boss sucks. Soon everyone was emailing about how stupid the situation was…
Except IT. Someone in IT reply all said it was a reminder and we all had access to see eachothers emails.
Somewhere along the line we forgot what we were even discussing and decided to turn into a competition to see who could reply more. What’s interesting about Reply All culture is how it knows no discrimination. Your coworker can be a kid who just got their first smartphone or your grandparents who still print emails out and prefer reading off of paper.
Age doesn’t matter. We all know how idiotic it is and partake in it with no care in who’s break it may be. I can’t help but wonder if there is some psychological trigger that engages when we hit Reply All.
Maybe it has something to do with the ‘fear of missing out’ and is our way of saying “Hi, I’m here!” to everyone else. Or maybe we’ve all just become so lazy that thinking about what each click does affects us so much that we throw all caution to the wind. Perhaps it’s something more sinister..
an officepolitically motivated act to annoy certain coworkers. Indirectly yelling at people by bulking them on an email chain. No matter how you look at it, we’re all losing.
I made up a study but I’m sure its completely accurate that said the average office worker spends 7 years of their life reading pointless email chains. 7 years we could be spending learning your job, building friendships, or sitting at your desk staring into space day dreaming. Let’s be real, day dreaming is what we should be doing.
Many have taken different routes when trying to find a solution. Some offices have tried technical training wheels by alerting you when your trying to Reply All to more then 20 people. Plants have a better chance of being adopted than these training emails.
There have even been some crazy companies that took away the Reply All option entirely forcing employees to manually edit the email addresses in the “To:” label. Hell will laugh at us when we try and stop this. Humanity is fantastic at digging ourselves into deeper holes of no etiquette.
Yet here I am yelling at all of you just by reading this article. Despite my anger and resentment towards my fellow man, I’ve fallen victim to the black hole of Reply All. I find myself justifying my actions by saying things like ‘ Oh he’s not part of the conversation, I should add Jill to this screenwriters discussing”的 productivity I’m helping.’ Yet here I am on my weakest of days trolling the Reply All button and adding to the digital gossip that I hate so much.
The scary part is, those memories will haunt you. Email chains show me a dark side of myself that I didn’t know existed: We are the monsters. At some point in our careers, we’ve all participated in emailing mayhem.
We’ve all made workplace-chat pointless. What can we do? Maybe instead of trying to better ourselves through office policies, we can start bettering how we treat each other’s precious time.
Someone’s attention is being stolen with every email we send that could be doing something more productive. Or, you can go full Jordan Peterson on this issue and try to eliminate the use of office emails completely. Write letters, send each other squirrels with memos attached, have actual conversations with your coworkers.
Until then I’ll keep wasting my time deleting utterly pointless messages, screaming into a void about how the world is coming to an end, and every now and then abusing the ‘Reply All’ button just to be a part of something I clearly don’t want to be associated with.
Once you hit reply, you’ve damned yourself to an awful digital world where I can’t even look myself in the mirror without disabling my email. Long live the uncensored email chain.
We all know it’s there. We all hate it. But for some reason we feel the need to torture ourselves with ‘Thank You’s from coworkers.
0 Comments