I have to physically restrain an impulse to delete unread any e-mail that arrives in my inbox flagged with a red exclamation point. Never once have I opened a flagged e-mail that seemed to me to necessitate and hence justify the flag. I have some students who will flag every goddamn e-mail they send me, as many as three a day. Who does that? What is that?
I think it's operating on the same principle as the physical
ReplyDeletejunk mail that's marked "Urgent: Open Immediately" or (what
is **much** worse, because it really forces you to open
it) mail that effectively looks as though it might be
official (tax audit, traffic ticket, jury-duty notice) or
from your bank (your automatic mortgage payment failed
to be made). That sort of adrenalin-spurt producing
disguise is much less easy to achieve over the phone,
fortunately.
My rule with e-mail (and with phone calls, for that
matter) is -- if I don't recognize who it's coming
from (and, in addition, the subject line isn't really
and truly and specifically relevant, like a reference
to a post I just made on a forum I frequent),
then I delete it without even looking.
Oh, and if it's coming from students who are semi-known
ReplyDeleteto you, then it's just a mark of a kind of naive rudeness
(which **hopefully** they'll grow out of, but which some
folks probably never do).
They think that by attracting the maximum amount of
attention they can pursue their own agenda more efficaciously,
like the kid in class who doesn't just raise is hand,
but who has to wiggle it around and squirm in his seat.
They apparently haven't yet realized how likely that
sort of thing is to have the opposite of its intended effect.
It's the Evil Bit, implemented in email.
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