TheBuzz
TheBuzz
Subject: FWD:
Endless drivelHey you, at the computer. Did you get the e-mail about how NFL Pro-Bowl player Kurt Warner met his wife?
Between the Kleenex, appearance-recovery and typing in the list of forwarding addresses, how much company time did that take up?
If the e-mail tale were not entirely true, could that time spent be considered wasted?
According to the online Urban Legends Reference pages at www.snopes.com, the story is only partially true, and it far beats the rumor.
Up to one-third of internal business e-mail is unnecessary, a Gartner Inc. survey found last year. Employees spend an average of 49 minutes a day managing e-mail; almost a quarter of them spend more than an hour a day. Gartner calls the cluttering of e-mail in-boxes and servers "occupational spam" that saps productivity.
It could be suggested that "friends don't send friends personal e-mails at work," but not everybody has a computer at home, nor does everybody go to the library/Internet cafe/friend's house to check personal e-mail. So into the office servers it goes.
"People have always come up with time-wasting ways," said Barbara Mikkelson, part of the husband and wife team behind Snopes. The couple researches several categories of cyber-circulating stories and scares; their findings and source references are then posted online.
As for the wildfire-rapid spread of misinformation, "The telephone made it easier," she said. "Now there are Web sites, chat rooms, mailing lists and our best friend, e-mail. It didn't change human nature any."
Compulsive forwarders, Mikkelson said, will send "whatever they get to all their friends, not just as a warning, but as a way to keep in touch." Forwards are used as placeholders for actual communication as a way of saying, "I'm alive and thinking of you," but they're busy.
Yeah but isn't everybody busy?
"Yes," Mikkelson said. "I've heard that rumor."
The Gartner survey projected that "ridding an enterprise of occupational spam alone can save 30 percent in the time employees spend managing e-mail." It recommends an e-mail productivity program formalizing etiquette guidelines such as: "Count to 10 before hitting 'reply all' -- then count to 20" and "Recipients of unwanted e-mail should craft polite replies to let the senders know they did not need to send a particular e-mail."
That philosophy can be extended homeward to ferret out untrue stories and used to gently direct forwarders to sites like hers, Mikkelson said. She suggests writing back, "Thanks for forwarding that along. It's an interesting story so I looked it up," and include the URL.
"This works for some, it won't work with most," she said. "Some people will be very angry with you."
"We don't handle some things very gracefully and discovering that we're wrong is high up there at the top of the list."
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin.
Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle,
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached
at: eengle@starbulletin.com