Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Slaves to the Wheel?

Apologies for the infrequent postings, but things have been fairly hectic on the work front and I have also been leaving the laptop at work more often than not as I am now more inclined to play my PSP on the train than bash away on the emails…

Today though is different and I have just finished posting 15 emails on various work related issues between Glenbrook and where I am now – going through Ashfield. These are just the emails I didn’t get time to write yesterday on account of being so busy doing the work from the day before! For the record, I reduced my Unread Items list from 57 to 13 and have expunged about 120 emails into the delete box to keep below the 250MB limit we now have on our inboxes. A colleague of mine actually got a lock put on his email because he was sitting at 350MB. Can you imagine that!? Your work stopping you sending emails because you had too many! The Help Desks answer was to request an increase in quota from your manager. They simply killed off productivity because he was sitting at 350MB, but if you can get your boss to simply send an email authorizing a limit up to 500MB at a snap of the fingers. Given our boss is in transit between London and LA at the moment, the ability to get such a simple approval wasn’t able to be done. My colleague in question read everything he could, made all the phone calls he could and went home at 4pm… I wish they’d lock my account!!

It is amazing though how you can be a slave to the email… whenever our server is down at work, basically all productivity stops. People chat over the cube farm walls about social things… the coffee shop does a roaring trade and then if the outage happens late in the day, people slink away thinking that whatever was important can now be put aside until tomorrow.

You know the office scenes in movies with phones ringing and people scrambling? It just isn’t true anymore. The office environment is still and quiet with the occaisional phone call and when the A/C dies and the background hiss fades away, all you hear are the tapping of keys…. Tap-tap-tap….

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