Day 1.129: Round and round

At work today I was involved in a multi-recipient email discussion that went, from my point of view, one email too far. As if to push the point home, the day started and ended with discussions of another email discussion and subsequent meeting about a matter of disagreement amongst the parents at the school - so this is by no means a preserve solely of the work-place.

I suppose that many of us have read warnings about email - how it seems like a throw-away spoken-word type of medium, but the words we write are probably as permanent as anything is these days. This two-fold nature is certainly part of the problem. What someone writes in haste can be studied at leisure, picked apart and thrown back at the originator in what sometimes becomes a personal attack. On the other hand, the quick off-the-cuff nature of it allows us to communicate often and in a relaxed way - and the permanence means that we do not have to interrupt what someone is doing to talk to them there and then - unlike a phone call. The other problem is the lack of non-verbal cues of course - no amount of emoticonating :-p can substitute for tone-of-voice and looking someone in the eye. All of this is only made worse by cross-cultural issues - which affect most of my conversations these days.

Ah well, hopefully tomorrow will not see a continuation of the vicious cycle that started today. Here are the girls and their friend going round and round in a no more constructive, but altogether more enjoyable way yesterday.