A Social Killer

A lot of science fiction plots, over time, have dealt with the theory that our bodies become weaker as we grow smarter. We create new technologies to make life easier, and so we move around less. Then, some day far in the future, we evolve into these strange creatures with skinny fragile bodies and monstrous brains. We'll just sit in a chair our entire life and not have to move. Of course, this won't happen to everyone. We'll also need a working race that slowly de-evolves into big strong apes that we control with our minds (get the movie reference yet?)

Now, I always thought that this was stupid. How could our society ever become that lazy? Well, my friends, I have seen the light...a big ol' fluorescent light that hums and sheds unnatural hues on the walls. oh wait, that's just the light in my office.

Now, this is normally where my tangent begins...but today, folks, I'm right on task. Today's blog is about how e-mail. It makes the world a little bit smaller, and a little less social. Let me explain.

As most people who read my blog know, I work at DuPont. My job involves a lot of communication with other people in my building. These are people that have offices within 50 yards of me. It's really quite close. I'm pretty sure that I could yell out someone's name and they could hear me on the other side of the building. But I digress.

When I first started, I would receive e-mails from colleagues, asking mundane questions about applications. Instead of writing back, I'd simply walk the 10 feet to their office and give them an answer. ...My boss told me to stop doing that. He gave some crazy explanation about using e-mail creates a record of conversations that we want to have, just in case the other person were to say that we didn't do our job. We could just print up an old e-mail and say "well, here is proof that we've been doing exactly what we were supposed to do"

Anyway, I started doing the e-mail thing. No matter what the question, I respond in an e-mail. I sometimes have days where I don't leave my tiny prison-like office...I just sit and write e-mails and occasionally talk on the phone.

I'm getting to a specific story here....there is a method.

I have a cool little gadget called an E-Pass. It's like a small pager that I keep on my key ring, and it displays a 6 digit number which changes every minute. I need to use that number to log into DuPont programs on the intranet. Every year, you have to renew this item or it gets turned off. Now we're getting closer to the real story.

Today, I got an e-mail...and it had been forwarded to just about everyone in my building at one point or another. It started at the top. Someone high up received an e-mail saying that a certain person....we'll call them SATAN...wanted to renew their E-Pass but the person who is in charge of Satan's E-pass hasn't renewed it yet. So this high up person forwarded the e-mail to the person who is supposed to renew the E-pass and asked them what the deal was. Now, this new person forwards the e-mail to 2 other high up people saying that they don't know Satan and they aren't sure if they should do it. The 2 other people each forward the e-mail to 5 others asking if anyone knows Satan, and if they are doing something that requires an E-Pass. One of those 5 others forwards the e-mail to a guy in England and asks if they know who Satan works for. The guy in England then forwards the e-mail to my boss, asking if we have Satan in our database, because that might give us an idea of what they do. My boss then forwards it to me, asking me to check the database for Satan.

This freakin e-mail traveled from offices all around me, then out to England, then down to Kentucky, and then back to my office. So I check our database and find that Satan is a user. Great. That's all that tells us. What good did it do to know that at one point in time, Satan used one of our programs? NOTHING.

At no point in time did anyone forward this e-mail to Satan himself. No one asked Satan why we needed his E-Pass renewed. No one asked Satan who he worked for. NO ONE ASKED SATAN ANYTHING!

And now it lays in my lap....a low Operations Manager, surrounded by high-ranking DuPont officials. What kind of a sick world do we live in? I think I'll just delete the e-mail...and go get lunch.