Tech Columnists' Day Without Email

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "When a recent power outage disrupted email service at WSJ.com, our tech columnists were plunged backwards into a time before every meeting, every little task, came with an email-program reminder, and where checking the bottom right of the screen for a new-mail envelope was futile. "Some of us quickly got a reminder that email is the lingua franca of projects that bridge different departments and involve a lot of people," Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry write. "For all the talk of whiteboarding, it's email threads that we rely on to remember where we left certain questions and what our next moves are. Similarly, email has become our storage system for important documents and works in progress--how often do you email yourself? It's also replaced the telephone for lots of our routine touching base between colleagues, friends and families: Instant messaging is simultaneously too casual and too intrusive, and weekday phoning is reserved for more-substantive matters and emergencies. So a lot of that social lubrication went out the window.""

Comments

Ah, well that explains it

[Anonymous Coward]

our tech columnists were plunged backwards into a time before every meeting, every little task, came with an email-program reminder

Ah, well that explains the recent tech rumor flurry then; the WSJ had simply been transported back in time to 1996, when Apple was dying

ugh

[Alcimedes]

Remind me not to work someplace where they promote "Social lubrication".

Re:ugh

[nizo]

The visual imagery from that term is horrible, something akin to a bunch of people standing in line to dip their hands into a really large jar of Vasoline which everyone shares.

Re:ugh

[Lord Dimwit Flathead]

You should be grateful they're using their hands.

Re:ugh

[nizo]

Ahh, so the imagery can get worse after all. Many thanks while I go look for an icepick to start poking into my head until the imagery goes away.

The first step

[CausticPuppy]

The first step is to admit that you have a problem.

How did they manage?

[falzer]

Without reading the article and knowing precisely what the story was, I would say that they all cracked eachother's heads open and feasted on the goo inside.

That explains it!

[mbbac]

This explains how the WSJ missed Steve Jobs' e-mail saying "we're not moving to Intel, jackasses!"

TinyURL.com

[xbrownx]

Does anyone else take a deep breath before clicking on one of these links at work?

slashdot

[3770]

How would productivity be affected if /. was down for a day?

Re:asdf

[Ithika]

That would be difficult without power. Unless, by "instant messenging", you mean you write down a message and a hamster instantly runs along the hall with it to its destination. Hmm, I might be on to something.

We tried using only telephones

[Anonymous Coward]

An employee suggested to me that we install telephones in a few offices here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using telephones instead of having to buy Eudora. I decided to let him install them in 5 offices to see how the employees got on. Besides, our IT manager had been using telephones at home and he hadn't reported any problems - why not try it on our employees?

Once he'd got the employees up and running with telephones we let them try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: The telephone system was a pretty good replacement for those shitty Eudora boxes we'd used before and the employees could still do their work as normal.

Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from our employees. Users could not do things they could before (like manage their contacts). The final straw came when one employee lost several hours work when the PBX suddenly froze up, effectively destroying our communication infrastructure.

Needless to say, the community offered no support whatsoever. I made the employee destroy the telephone system and lets just say he's not with us anymore.