Humans are damn fine machines when plugged into one another. Voices, vibes, faces, bodies, winks, hand gestures, touching another’s hand or shoulder impulsively, stares, grins, frowns, hand-written thank you notes, human electricity, NOT-typing, non-virtual joking, yelling, ragging and flirting, real confrontation, intimacy and the “god-in-the-room” magic that starts with two breathing humans in one 3-D place. Stuff gets done, too–and done right. What happened?
—What About Clients? in past posts over the years.
I remember when I first got e-mail, back in the mid-1990s. I would rush home with great anticipation and dial in my 4800-baud modem and I would have…four messages from four very good friends….Now, of course, I get up in the morning and go to my computer and have sixty-four messages, and the anticipation I once felt has been replaced by dread.
–Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, in Afterword to 2002 edition, 274 (Little, Brown & Co.)
E-mail is an overhyped, misused tool. And so are you if you use it without thinking. I receive about 100 non-spam e-mails a day. I write about one third that many, most as replies. Usually short ones. They are often soulless, and easy to misunderstand, even when I try to be precise. Unless I am scheduling when and where to meet someone, I am not sure that I see the point of it anymore.
The e-mails I get back are often worse than the ones I write. The truth: most lawyers just can’t write. When they write, they “talk to themselves”–like mental patients do rocking back and forth. Typing it themselves makes all that more of a problem.
E-mailing “just because” is Bad Craziness–and you might start seeing those bats. Or worse. (Art: R. Steadman)