Paging Mr. Big Stuff - etiquette of E-mail, voice mail and other personal communications systems - Workstyles - Column

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1994 by Nick Sullivan

WHEN I WAS IN THIRD AND fourth grades, my friends and I engaged in a never-ending dialog trying to answer the question: What's the least painful way to die--drowning, freezing, or burning? Girls would squirm and ask one another: If you had to marry someone in this class, whom would it be?

A similar question comes to mind today: What's the least annoying way to receive messages--electronic mail, voice mail, fax, or pager? I ask this because I've read about and heard from so many people who claim to have about had it with staying in touch anytime, anywhere, which suddenly becomes every time, everywhere. I haven't yet reached the saturation point, which probably means I'm not popular, not important, or not very accessible, so I can only speculate on how annoying it must be to receive 200 e-mail and 50 voice-mail messages in a day.

But if technology can give, why can't it also take away? If a top executive can hire a secretary to screen phone calls, why can't she hire an intelligent agent (read: software robot) to screen e-mail. (Nicholas Negroponte, director of the world-renowned MIT Media Lab, mockingly notes that he's been surrounded by intelligent agents all his life--human beings.) Aren't agents the big new software utility of the 1990s, designed to rescue us from the rigors of information overload? Just train the little things to go out and do our dirty work, get our box scores and stock quotes, and then deliver them with a smile (like my dog Lefty used to do with the morning paper).

Clearly there's a market need for blocking out unwanted messages and mail. Why doesn't someone create an intelligent agent that acts as a bodyguard for your electronic mailbox? An agent that automatically dumps unwanted mail in the trash or doesn't allow it to be sent in the first place? Or, just as you need a personal and private password to sign on to commercial online services, why couldn't that service allow you to create another password that would restrict access to your mailbox?

The phone companies could do the same with voice mail and deliver the recording: "You have reached the voice mail of Mr. Big Stuff. To leave a message, please enter his PIN." Wouldn't that save these overwrought recipients of verbiage some time? They could assign one mailbox for riffraff like you and me and reserve another for those with PIN access. The inner sanctum.

What about the people who really do like to be bombarded and give you four or five options for reaching them--voice mail, e-mail, wireless e-mail, pager, or cellular phone? They're treating you like one of their intelligent agents, making you do the dirty work of tracking them down! They then have the nerve to complain about not being able to shut out the world.

That's somewhat the attitude of Charles B. Wang, chairman and CEO of Computer Associates. He shuts down the company e-mail system for five hours every day so people can work rather than gossip with coworkers they can't see. Maybe we'll soon see a get-back-to-basics movement in the workplace--just like we had in school. Forget the fancy technology for a bit and do your job. As Paul Soffo, director of the Institute for the Future, says, "One of the key challenges of the 1990s is finding the Off button."

How do you like it when you leave a message in five places and the dude never gets back to you? Makes you feel pretty important, doesn't it? You have to assume Mr. Big Stuff got the message and decided that you weren't in the top 100 callbacks of the day--or maybe he found the Off button. Oh well, maybe next week. I feel especially good when I page someone who doesn't return the call. I can just imagine him looking at my name and number and saying, "Let the sucker rot."

Hey, I just remembered. My pager's been turned off for a month. Maybe it's full of messages. Maybe I'm more important than I think I am. Gotta run and count my messages. See you next month.