An associate of mine spent two hours one morning being pissed off. These were a couple of hours which began with a mere minute of checking e-mail first thing, one of the most routine of daily activities. There it was, sitting there: the vague one liner. The sender of this e-mail was not around to explain what it was all about. So, thanks to the wonders of the human imagination, it festered. It caused stress. It painted a person’s entire day a nasty shade. Of course, when the sender showed up, it turned out there was nothing to be stressed about after all. In fact, the entire subject was dismissed with barely even a hand gesture. The power of the e-mail has rarely been more apparent to me. I’ve spent plenty of time myself simmering about this kind of thing, but witnessing firsthand someone else’s stress really brought the point home. Nothing worse than those sentence fragments. The least you can do when you’re abandoning the rules of grammar is make some effort to spell correctly. Now, let’s do some math. Take those two hours of stress caused by four short words (not counting the mangled punctuation) and multiply that by everyone who has made the unfortunate decision to join the legions of Blackberry users.

Apparently, this guy seems to agree with me. He’s even backed his point of view up with some links to statistics. He calls his lecture “7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable”, and from what I gather, he blames the Internet for a lot of the misery. I think he’s onto something. For a long time now, I’ve felt e-mail is one of the most overused and abused forms of communication. It’s great for some things, like getting back in touch with long lost family and friends, but it’s a poor substitute for face to face discussion. The fact is, most communication occurs with non-verbal cues. With e-mail (and text messaging, for that matter), we’re restricted to only the words we see. It’s all too easy to misinterpret these words, especially if we want to misinterpret them. An aggravated person can have a field day. Considering how reliant we are on e-mail in day-to-day business, it’s amazing to me that there’s not far more e-mail related violence in the workplace.

I’ve used e-mail and instant messaging in one form or another for years now. I try to be extra sensitive to people who are on the receiving end of my e-mails. That means an extra word or sentence here and there to at least attempt to make things clear. Unfortunately, this can have a negative effect when someone’s trying to read your long-winded e-mail from a Blackberry. I’m always tempted to make my e-mails twice as long to further drive home the point that Blackberries are inherently wrong, but I resist this urge. It’s all about being considerate.

I also use instant messaging. I’ve been told on more than one occasion that people get intimidated by my instant messages because I type so fast and tend to be critical about things like spelling and grammar. So, not only have I managed to intimidate people when we’re face to face, I can actually freak people out with my typing ability and stunning command of the English language. Oh well. I also avoid using all those cutesy abbreviations and smiley faces like LOL and , all except for WTF. I like that one a lot. Blackberries. WTF.