Email Fail

May 17, 2013

How The Stock Market Works

As much as I'd like to deny it, the state test is the culmination of our year. But we still have a month to go. So we're trying some new things this year, including a short unit on the stock market and consumer math.

The above video is a pretty good overview of how stock is created and what it means.

Email

Electronic communication is so impersonal. I'd rather talk face to face. And seeing as how I'm in the people business, I think this is a relatively inoffensive stance to take. The people who work closely with me know that I'm not a big email person, and they just yell at me when I wander into their rooms (which I do CONSTANTLY). Over the past few years, the amount of useless communications that come through my email has increased to the point where it's difficult even to skim every message to determine if they are junk.

Today, there was an unfortunate "Reply All" hit at work 

(I was not involved in any way).

When someone dropped by to tell me about it, I had no clue because I had not followed the email string. Why would I? This had nothing to do with me and the conversation spanned five messages and over 2000 words. 

What a waste of time.

But once I was told about the issue, it did bother me. Only because the message came from someone who never volunteers to help criticizing someone who volunteers for everything.

We live in a world with walls and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns. 

Who's gonna do it? 

You?!?

I have neither the time, nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of freedom which I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.

I would rather you just said "thank you" and went on your way, or grab a gun and stand a post.

Either way, I DON'T GIVE A DAMN WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE ENTITLED TO!!

This led to a conversation about my prioritization of email and where it fits in my professional life. I was reminded (gently) that email is annoying but probably part of our professional responsibilities. But yeah, it's probably ok to have strengths and weaknesses and we all excel at different things.

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Let  me be clear about this next part. I'm probably wrong and the sender is probably right.

Anyway, what got me thinking about email is that the major policy shift I missed in a one sentence email. 

It was a long sentence and it was the same email I've received hundreds of times.

"Hey, the weather looks weird so we'll keep the tennis game on unless the weather gets worse..."

So I assumed the last part of that email would continue in that way.

I went about my day, keeping an eye on the courts to know if we needed to cancel at the end of the day.

I know it seems weak that tennis matches are cancelled if the courts are a little wet. But it's like trying to play basketball on sand or playing ice hockey on concrete. 

You just can't do it.

At the end of the day, the courts were still wet and when I went to cancel the match, I thought I was doing the right thing... until our AD came running down the hall waving her hands, telling me to stop. We were going to have the other school come over to play pickleball.

Huh?

We've never done that before? 

What are you talking about? 

I've been working here for years and we've never just switched sports. (At the time we had this conversation, I was slightly flustered and confused so I may have said something stupid like "How are we supposed to learn a new sport?" Remember, I know I was wrong about all this.)

So the second part of that email I didn't read? It said something like 

"...worst case scenario we can play pickleball in the gym. Let me know if that's ok."

Our kids didn't get to play, the kids from the other school didn't get to play, and we still owed money for the bus.

Crap. 

I screwed that up every way possible.

If I had just read the one important sentence out of the 1,348 sentences that crammed my inbox today, I could have avoided this.

Clearly, I need to get a better handle on this.

I went from 647 unread emails, down to 30.

(most of those were spam or updates that weren't important)

And I'm finally deleting old email from previous years.

I was keeping them because one time somebody said something about saving emails for lawsuits. 
I don't think anyone is suing a middle school.

Today's Photo:

Dad and I had the afternoon free (because of my massive bungling up above).
We used some kind of extended pruner to cut this tree back.
So that was fun.