C in Towson reminded me of two things that happened this week. They’re both email-related.

Email 1 (note this occurred on a Tuesday)

Email 1
Me: Joe, can you ship the LCD projector to 123 Main St., Anaheim, CA 92802? I need it for this Friday morning.

Email 2
Joe: I’ll just bring it with me.

Email 3
Brian: Umm, when are you coming?

Email 4
Joe: Tuesday

Email 5
Brian: See, that won’t work. I need it THIS Friday.

Email 6
Joe: Send me the address.

Email 7
Brian: See email 1.

Email 2 was over the weekend, when I was dealing with a customer for seven hours. Did I mention it was the weekend? Yeah.

Emails 1 to 10
Me and customer working to resolve the problem. Fine.

Email 11
Brian: We’ve discovered the problem. It has to do with the some values in the importanttable table being wrong. They need to be set to 1. The steps to fix it are:

1. Go to DOS using Start -> Run, type cmd.exe, hit Enter.
2. Change to the MySQL directory by typing ‘cd \mysql’
3. Go into MySQL CLI by typing ‘bin\mysql -uroot -pthepassword mydatabase’
4. Once at the ‘mysql>’ prompt, type ‘UPDATE importanttable set importantvalue=1 where thecriteria=0;’ and hit Enter.
5. MySQL CLI will tell you a certain number of rows were affected. Type ‘quit’ to quit.

Email 12
Customer: Ok, I understood the problem. Can you send instructions on how to fix?

Email 13
Brian: See previous email.

Email 14
Customer: Ok, it’s fixed now.

Time elapsed between the time when I sent them the instructions and when they replied back, asking for the instructions? About 1/2 an hour.

The thing that kills me is that I strive to be precise when I send out email. When I craft an email, I consider it carved into the written record for all time. You never know how long the recipient will keep it for, who he/she will forward it on to, etc.

Attention spans are shrinking in our society, so I’m not fooling myself that this problem will go away. Just wanted to rant!