h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One of my tasks in the office is to e-mail people to say when there’s a major IT problem, or to tell them if we’re bringing a system offline to make a change. This isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.

If anyone ever offers you the opportunity to do this, refuse. Nobody remembers when you get it right, but there are so many ways to get it wrong and make a fool of yourself. On the face of it, you’d think it was simple, but danger lurks at every turn.


First things first - people don’t like receiving e-mails. Some people make it their life’s work to reply to every e-mail they receive to complain that they shouldn’t have received it at all. It’s as if the little ‘ping’ as it landed in their In-Box disrupted them from doing any work at all - and having seen the vitriol they send in return, it’s plain it did.


And then there’s the timing. If it’s a major incident, then everybody is clamouring for information about when the system will be back up and running, but then all the technicians will tell you “just 5 minutes while we reboot this server and it’ll all be back up again”. If you send the e-mail to say the system’s down, you know you’ll have to send another one 5 minutes later to say it’s back. This is fuel to the fire of Mr Anti-Email: “Why couldn’t you have waited 5 minutes rather than spam me with this nonsense?”


And if you wait, then it follows that the reboot isn’t going to fix it after all. But you can’t send your e-mail then, as the technicians tell you that it’ll just take another 3 minutes to restart application services, or clear the cache, or re-map the domain settings, or change the IP address - every step is designed to keep you on tenterhooks with your finger hanging over that ‘Send’ button, while users and managers yell at you asking for information.


And then there’s the content. The language needs to be absolutely perfect. Not only that, but the style has to be perfect, too. Not too chummy, but not too geeky - something which conveys honesty, professionalism, urgency, empathy and wisdom.

And the technical detail, too. It’s so easy to make a mistake on dates or times, or to, say, write Tuesday 4th November, when Tuesday is the 3rd - leaving people unsure whether it’s the Tuesday or the 4th which is correct.


The biggest trap of all is the distribution. Nobody keeps e-mail distribution lists up to date. No-one who’s joined the company in the last 3 months is likely to be on them. And in large organisations these lists are huge. If it’s the expenses system, say, that’s down then your e-mail will need to go out to everyone, including the board of directors.


Perhaps the greatest mistake you can make is to send your e-mail to a lot of people using the ‘To’ or ‘Cc’ fields. You must use the ‘Bcc’ (blind copy) field, otherwise everyone can not only see everyone else on the list, but they can do something a lot worse - they can Reply-All to them.

This is the comms sender’s worst nightmare. Mr Anti-Email or Mr Grammar-Pedant or Mr Wise-Crack decides to reply-all. And then other people reply-all to their comments. And then people reply-all to ask them whether they know they’re replying all. And then people reply-all telling them to stop replying-all. Then Technical managers who should know better reply-all to say if people keep replying-all the e-mail servers will grind to a halt. Then people reply-all to say they didn’t start it. Then the CEO replies-all to tell people to stop. Then people who don’t know who the MD is reply-all with more wisecracks. Then the e-mail server grinds to a halt.


If anyone ever offers you the opportunity to send company-wide e-mails, make any excuse you can think of, but refuse.

"people don’t like receiving e-mails" [Icy North]

And yet, and yet..... It's a condition of employment for so many of us that we don't have choice. If we want to keep our jobs, we have to put up with email. Worse, our private email accounts soon get bogged down with Spam, some of it accompanied by viruses and Trojans. Why did the compute r industry not see this coming and devise a better plan?

The next time I get one of those e-mails, I'll reply all with the above

<BB<

[Amy P]

I like e-mails better than phonecalls as they give me a record of a conversation for reference later, but I do prefer not to receive unnecesary e-mails, and Reply All does have a lot to answer for...

I sent a mass e-mail on Monday, to as few people as I could manage by streamlining the distribution list first, and still had to spend a good couple of hours dealing with the replies afterwards, so I sympathise with this and laugh because of your way with words as well

Where I work, if our IT needs to contact everyone regarding system downtime, they send out a message via the system. no need for updating distribution lists or anything.

If everyone is affected*, because of a temporary server shutdown or an update to one of the programs (Lotus - ) they send out an e-mail.

* i.e. including the directors and managers who don't dirty their hands using the order processing/accounting system, and who have probably never touched any of the function keys on their keyboard.

The lady who does administration of the e-mail program, updates, accounts, addresses and weird queries etc keeps the "All employees" list as well. Maybe it is automatically adjusted when a new account is created or when someone leaves. You just have to choose that from the list of possible addressees.

However, as for the wording of the messages - IT has a language of its own. As long as the dates and times are correct (which they often aren't, mainly because the work can take up to 2 days longer than anticipated) no one really minds. Who would admit they don't understand it?!?

When you say 'send out a message via the system' I guess you mean some sort of pop-up message when they log in?

I agree that's better than e-mail, so long as it's a system everybody is expected to have used before the downtime. Otherwise, how else do they find out?


There's quite a bit of mistrust between the IT department and the rest of the business, and if someone finds they've taken a system down without them knowing, then it causes all sorts of political noise.