Technically Incorrect

Being an accountant is hard.

You have to deal, in general, with people who can't count, can't save receipts, and then expect you to bail them out from all their troubles.

So please consider the plight of Vicki Walker, an accountant with ProCare Health in Auckland, New Zealand.

According to the trusty New Zealand Herald, ProCare, in dismissing Walker, told her that her e-mail style had caused ripples of disturbance in the serene landscape of her fellow workers' minds.

Her sins, for there were reportedly several, were that she used capital letters, bold typefaces and, perish the mere concept, red text in her e-mails.

Perhaps Walker should have just sent a nice, hand-written note.

(Credit: CC Thomas Eagle/Flickr)

Walker reacted to this dismissal with an exclamation point and some question marks. She took ProCare Health to an employment tribunal, where she was awarded 17,000 NZ dollars ($11,447) in compensation.

She told the Herald that she found it curious that ProCare Health only produced one e-mail in evidence during the proceedings.

This was not an e-mail for those of a tender disposition. It was intended to advise staff on how to fill out claim forms.

The time and date were in deep red. And one sentence was rather boldly highlighted in blue. It read: "To ensure your staff claim is processed and paid, please do follow the below checklist."

Goodness, that does seems terribly abrasive, doesn't it?

Walker had to fight hard in order to see her claim succeed. She told the Herald: "I am a single woman with a mortgage, and I had to re-mortgage my home and borrow money from my sister to make it through. They nearly ruined my life."

Perhaps it isn't all that surprising, then, that having won her case for unfair dismissal, she now reportedly intends to pursue ProCare for further compensation.

I wonder whether she'll be outlining her claims in an e-mail. Perhaps she might use bold green type.

Some intellectuals want to study humanity. Others just want to study humanity's e-mails.

Which can, sometimes, be more fascinating than the people who wrote them.

A couple of researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology seem to be in the e-mail study camp. Or perhaps there was simply nothing better to think about in Melbourne, Fla., recently.

In any case, they took it upon themselves to examine the e-mails sent at Enron, specifically, how the e-mailing patterns changed as Enron was revealed to be channeling the spirit of Bernie Madoff, rather than Bernie Mac or Bernie Kosar.

The researchers, Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes, concluded, according to a report in New Scientist, that e-mailing patterns just might be a rather accurate barometer of your company's innards.

I wonder who else was in their e-mail group.

(Credit: CC Alex-S/Flickr)

Collingsworth and Menezes thought it might be fun to see whether the pattern of e-mails written at the time of the resignation of Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling in 2001 might carve out a dainty paisley or the Rorschach inkblot of a disturbed dipsomaniac.

They simply looked at who sent e-mails to whom and how many were sent.

What they discovered was that a month before Skilling fell on his letter-opener, the number of active e-mail cliques--the researchers defined them as e-mail groups in which every member had direct e-mail contact with each other--rose from 100 to 800.

Here's the other characteristic that seemed to foreshadow the spilling of corporate o-positive: more messages were sent within these groups to the exclusion of anyone else in the company.

There is one small downside to this kind of research: most organizations won't let you look at e-mail logs because of concerns about privacy, which is totally understandable.

However, I have a fanciful notion, perhaps slightly fueled by the high level of discourse in the tech world, that techies can, in the privacy of their own PC world, discover everything that is electronically occurring in their domain.

So I wonder whether, in the depths of corporate IT departments across the world, there are clever people studying the finely-weaved patterns of their company's e-mail behavior.

Not out of some misplaced, droopy-headed snoopiness. But because, well, there's a recession out there and they need to know whether their employers will still be their employers when the sun rises.

If you've never been to Wales, you should rectify this immediately.

The people have a talent for being more miserable than a lonely, one-legged sheep. The weather can be more spiteful than coach-class cabin crew.

Yet the nation often finds a way of creating beautiful absurdity beyond the imagination of any French film director.

The latest example, from Wales' second city, Swansea, is a singular delight.

Swansea is not a city that every swan would choose as its home. Its average monthly temperature never exceeds 19 degrees Centigrade--yes, 66 degrees Fahrenheit. But its city council tries to make it a livable place.

For example, the council is assiduous in ensuring that those who speak English and Welsh have equal rights when it comes to its road signs.

Every sign has to be bilingual, although that doesn't mean that every city employee is bilingual.

In the area of Morriston, a new sign was needed, one that told drivers of heavy goods vehicles that they were not welcome on a particular street.

The official responsible for the road sign immediately e-mailed its in-house translation service for an accurate Welsh rendition of "No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only."

The translator wasn't around--perhaps, he or she was in the pub or, perhaps, practicing indoor bowling (Swansea hosts the world championships). So the official received an automated e-mail reply: "I am out of the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated."

Those who speak Welsh tend to be proud folk. They also tend to send e-mails in Welsh. However, the English-speaking official thought the automated e-mail was the actual translation. Well, it was two sentences and it seemed like the right length.

The Welsh here reads: "Please meet me in the office supplies room for a snog."

(Credit: CC Spixey)

Please imagine the delight (for those with a sense of humor) and the angst (for most of the neighborhood) when the bilingual sign was put up, with the nontranslation printed verbatim.

It does make one wonder just how many council officials might have seen the sign before it was erected. It also makes one wonder whether at least one of them thought this was so funny that he would just let it happen to brighten his otherwise woeful day.

The strange thing is that this is not the first time Wales has been lost in mistranslation. Cyclists between the Welsh cities of Penarth and Cardiff in 2006 were somewhat surprised to see a bilingual road sign telling them they had problems with an "inflamed bladder".

I do have a suggestion for all Welsh councils, though, that might solve the problem. Write all of your e-mails and road signs in Wenglish.

Wenglish sounds like the perfect compromise. It is a dialect, rooted in both English and Welsh, that should surely become the official language of Wales.

The expert on the subject and author of the seminal Wenglish tome is a Welsh (and Urdu) speaker called Robert Lewis.

Lewis appears to be someone significant at VisitWales, a government organization that encourages Welsh tourism.

Perhaps they could put him in charge of road signs. And, um, e-mails.

What do your email habits say about you?

Do you feel fine when you wait a day or two to reply to an email? Do you feel driven to reply within 30 seconds of the message hitting your inbox? Or are you one of those people for whom email has simply become a source of stress akin to, oh, traffic on the 405? Or marriage.

Some recent research by Dr. Karen Renaud at the University of Glasgow and Dr. Judith Ramsay of Paisley University suggests that for some people the emailing thing has become all too much.

38% of people claim that they're pretty relaxed about the role of email in their lives. 28% drive through the pressure of email communication as if it were a Nascar race with Tony Stewart grazing their rear.

But the members of Problem Group, an alleged 34%, feel that email is overwhelming them to the point of derangement. They feel that those who have sent them emails have certain expectations.

(Credit: CC JasonRogers)

In their heads they hear the whispered demands to reply immediately. They fear that if they don't, they will be ostracized by some social bosom. This Problem Group is comprised of people pleasers. And we all know what an onerous task people pleasing can be. The majority of this Group, according to the researchers, is female.

Apparently, many people check their emails 30 to 40 times an hour. More times than David Beckham looks in the mirror.

And research from Loughborough University in England has suggested that it takes the average mind 64 seconds to readjust to the task at hand after being interrupted by an email. Add a few seconds more if you have one of those annoying beeps that tells you the lost soul in Accounts has sent you a fourth reminder to fill in your timesheets.

"The problem is that when you go back to what you were doing, you've lost your chain of thought and, of course, you are less productive," said Dr. Renaud.

In essence, she feels, all this email checking is just a virus for the brain. Before you know it, your mind is listless and you cannot muster the enthusiasm to create another PowerPoint.

Perhaps the strangest thing in all this is that those who are driven to answer emails within a nanosecond and those who psychologically sink beneath the deluge of their inbox have a common emotional characteristic. They just don't like themselves much.

Yet no one has discovered what happens to trigger a 'driven' person to suddenly become overwhelmed. Some scientists, including Dr. Tom Stafford from the University of Sheffield, are suggesting that email behavior is very similar to that exhibited by large Vegas tourists who have been sitting at the same slot machine for three days.

"Both slot machines and email follow something called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule'," he told The Guardian newspaper, "which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits. This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful - an invite out, or maybe some juicy gossip - and I get a reward."

If I put all this research together I have to conclude that gamblers really don't like themselves very much. And that Twitter users are, at least in part, escapees from this psychological emailing Guantanamo.

My biggest problem is that the pressure for a swift reply results in one writing emails that perhaps weren't meant to be written at all. Your physical reflexes work so quickly that your mind only catches up 64 seconds after you have pressed 'send.'

And then you sit there, oaf-like, suddenly realizing that you've agreed to attend a Hannah Montana concert with the folks from Procurement.