The company that owns the station that I work at is pretty big, but it’s only really gotten that way in the last couple of years. Email-wise, it’s been just recently that there have been wide distribution lists created for corporate broadcast of various items (some of you definitely know what I’m talking about). The impact of that has recently been demonstrated on a large number of my co-workers here and nationwide.
Someone somewhere in our organization decided to share some promotional offer that really only applied to a subset of our stations to every on-air person in our company (several hundred people at least). That in itself wouldn’t have been that irritating–if it hadn’t been for an enormously huge number of the recipients of the message using the "reply to all" button to either make a comment (wisecrack or otherwise), or some request to be "taken off the list"–apparently assuming they’d been added to somebody’s cutesy distribution list.
As you can just imagine, the mushrooming effect of something like this bordered on the ridiculous after a couple of hundred of these hits your inbox. But after a while, it just got to be funnier and funnier. I couldn’t tell whether my talented co-workers either didn’t realize they were continually sending their messages to everyone or didn’t care that they were or just wanted to irritate everyone else as much as they were. Occasionally, some of them were pretty funny and a few were insightful enough to wonder if we could all find some forum where we could share some of what we know with one another.
But just like the volume of messages themselves, that notion just quietly faded away. I doubt we could no more creatively collaborate any better than we handled the "reply to all" button. But who knows? Maybe another, better message will come along that we all will get that will actually be worth discussing, and something worthwhile may actually occur. There’s a first time for everything…
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