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

today i sent an email ...... it was sent to one of my team and in it i asked her to contact a client and ask him to get his finance director to co-operate with us pfq (use your imagination here.. the p is for "pretty" and the q is for "quick")....what i forgot to do, of course, was to check my recipient list for the mail .... and so, it transpired that the client, his finance director, my team member...and possibly the entire heavenly host... all got the mail ....

now this is clearly embarassing for me .... though thankfully not terminally so... and it made me think a little....

the inclusion or exclusion of others in the minutae of our lives .... in our communications .... in our thought patterns ... was always a pretty arbitrary thing....we learn the black arts of "need to know" at an early age and hone the skills throughout our lifetime.... in fact our whole life is normally a series of one act plays lived out for whichever audience we deem appropriate.... and what they don't know, we assume, will never hurt them....

and then something happens and they do know.... and all our communication constructs end up crumbled on the pavement....and there is always a price to pay....

now this is no new thought ..... for originality it ranks with "who invented god?" or "how did jacobs get the figs into fig rolls?" ..... but newness and originality, despite what i like to tell myself, are not the sole arbiters or meaningful sentence creation .... and today's lesson was a good one.....

i need to get it into my head pfq

And in the land of email and web page posts, the quick and easy, off hand remarks that feel like mere conversation are in indelible black and white. Even if it's pixels instead of ink.

I've had the heart stopping moment of realising I've sent something somewhere unintended.

Watching Big Brother, it seems the popularly held 'right thing' to do is never to say anything of anyone that you wouldn't say to them. It's nonsense. Got to be if for no other reason than that there are professional roles and relationships where you have to put on expected personas.

But apart from that, we all need space to talk more freely with people we know, who know us and know how to take and interpret what's said. Who know context and intent etc.

If your accident isn't terminal, it might even prove effective...

now that's the conclusion i'm banking on......