Just a work email that’s been sitting in my drafts folder for months
Maybe one day I’ll hit send
Dear B—,
Thanks and regards for your thanks and regards.
I normally start my work emails with something professional and vaguely kind, like “I hope this email finds you well.”
Between you and me, what I actually hope is that this email finds you at the bottom of a well. Something deep and stoney. Not necessarily in any physical danger, but certainly stuck, with a bad wifi signal, while the cold and earthy well water wades as high as your waist. It would be a chance for you to self-reflect, B—, on the kinds of emails you’d like to be remembered by.
I am writing in regards to your above correspondence, dispatched in my direction at 4:03 p.m. on the Friday afternoon just gone. It was, to be candid, no picnic. There are crime thrillers with shorter word counts. Why the hell did you choose the Courier New font? And at size 14? Have you no shame? I note also that you said ‘utilised’ and ‘leveraged’ as many as three times each. The body copy is grammatically immaculate; but you have more semicolons than you have full stops; and that’s pretentious.
Your email was striking, B—. In much the same way a punch to the head is striking. One particularly concussive sentence in your fifth (!) paragraph:‘We must keep the procurement probity rich to preserve, and engender, viable competitive tension.’
Like, what are you even talking about?
I’ve had this problem before with you. I even made a little translation guide for my own reference:
Ideation: Thinking.
Let’s backchannel and reintegrate on strategic direction: I’ll talk to my boss, you talk to your boss, then we’ll present those ideas as our own.
Living, breathing document: Document.
Utilised/Leveraged: USED. My god.
Our previous miscommunication: You made a mistake.
From the perspective of your interpretation: You think I made a mistake?
Holistic, 360 degree solution: Not sure.
Workplace proximity associate to workplace proximity associate, B—, your email is quadruple the size of my attention span and is frankly not interesting. Where’s the hook? The plot? As a graduate of as many as two online short story writing courses, can I suggest that you either:
Strip it back to the foundations, don’t use any word longer than two syllables, and deliver your message in the form of a quick corporate haiku.
Keep the email as is but add a murder mystery into the copy.
Imagine, ‘Dear Angus, The vicar was found dead with an old watch in his pocket and the kettle boiling on the stove. I want to talk to you about corporate synergy.’ Kapow!
And then later, ‘We need to ensure the stakeholder is delivered a holistic, 360 degree solution. Two years before the murder, during a terrible storm, the Vicar’s wife had had a secret affair with the village’s only policeman.’
Now I’m invested in your competitive tension, whatever that turns out to be.
Do you really believe this stuff? Did you wake up this morning and smile at the sun and think, I’m going to make the world a better place today, one cryptic gobbledygook sentence at a time? Do you think the Vicar’s older brother, Frey, might be pressuring him to absorb debts from the family farm? Do you ever bite your fingernails off thinking about how your job, all corporate jobs, are made up? A way to keep the economy (also made up) alive? Ever wonder how you’d go if we had to start bartering again, e.g. ‘Hello good sir, I’ll keep your procurement probity rich if you give me that goose?’
I wonder, B—, if Acting Senior Regulation and Policy Officer was what you wanted to be when you grew up? Did any of your childhood dream jobs even involved a desk?
On the day he died, the Vicar had some teeth removed under general anaesthetic by the village dentist (also his sister-in-law). When the anaesthetic haze wore off, the Vicar insisted he drive himself home (joking that God could take the wheel if he dozed off). The dentist phoned the policeman to check he got home safely.
I came into the office early today, B—, and landed myself a nice desk near the window. If I do an about turn in my swivel chair, I can see the river. And the trees to the north. A very wide sky. And people, with their tiny briefcases, scurrying to or fro some job that is, I’m sure, not so very unlike my own.
A job is a job is a job. Sometimes a mercy, sometimes a calling, sometimes the feeding hand I want to tear to shreds with my canines. The thing I do more than I sleep, B—. The biggest barrier to, and also the thing that entirely pays for, the stuff that I think makes me me. A desk I sit at. A clock I watch. I’m grateful for the privilege to be ungrateful for it, which I feel guilty about most days. Does that make sense?
You can learn all kinds of cosmic truths sitting at a desk by the river for eight hours. Like that a day has a physical weight. That no single second of being alive is unendurable. That everything happens for a reason, and a lot of the time that reason is simple human error and/or incompetence. That everyone poops. That the more emails you send, the more emails you’ll get back.
Before he died, by poison, the Vicar in the death throes scribbled what looked like: ‘Pay back - truth fairy’ on the magnetic whiteboard on his refrigerator.
How often in a day do you have to convince a machine that you are not a machine, B—? Multiple multi-factor authentications. Click on every image that contains a hexagonal stop sign. That password is too easy, make it 25 nonsense hieroglyphs. Captcha. Spam. I tick the Remember Me box, but how soon Adobe Acrobat forgets.
My driving point here, B—, is that your email is not real human communication. It’s two robots back channeling with each other through a (long) (boring) series of cliches that leverages a very many words to say nothing. Mean nothing.
And how glorious it will be for me, B—, to hit send on this reply, and then to turn away from my computer and see something green. And wonderful. And truly alive.
Warmest regards,
In fact, piping hot regards,
My regards are exactly as hot as the plate in a restaurant that the waiter tells you is too hot to touch, but you touch it anyway, and it hurts (of course) but you also feel like you learned something about yourself,
Angus
P.S. The Vicar was killed by his brother, Frey, over an inheritance-related dispute.
