15 Reasons Emails Fail

Theories on why emails don’t work where they are supposed to –
the work place.

1. Email as a power tool: you feel you are more powerful than the sender, and by not responding you unveil your aura.
2. The other side of power: you sincerely send an email hoping to receive a response from a power (inverse of #1).
3. Human as an email’s courier: you play your part by forwarding the email in your inbox to a third party with a crisp ‘fyip’.
4. Email as a distraction: At a particularly intense moment during a meeting, your eyes need much-needed respite from eye contact, and you turn to that email that has, at that precise moment, landed in your inbox. This happens when the meeting takes place in your cubicle.
5. Email as a full-stop: to signal the end of a meeting, particularly when you have finished your spiel, and it’s the turn of the person on the other side of the table.
6. Wrong name: when you write an email to someone but spell their name wrong, write their name in lower case, address a Mr. as a Ms., or plain simple sent the right email to the wrong recipient.
7. Stuck in outbox: When you don’t do send-receive. You realize this only after a heated argument where you insist that you had sent the email, and it’s the recipient who has not read it.
8. Lost in translation: by “sent it” you meant ‘whatsapp’ while the recipient expected email.
9. 25MB attachment: you take a coffee break and the internet breaks.
10. OOO: A person who is out of office will not respond.
11. Dear All: when you write to 10 people to get one task done.
12. Acting dumb: when you ask via email a query that has already been answered in a meeting half-an-hour ago, you get the response, “why are we discussing something that has already been discussed?”
13. Attention deficit hyperactivity: you read the subject and move on to the next email, and the next and the next.
14. Spam filter: wrong keyphrase, simply blacklisted.
15. Lengthy backstory: main message hidden deep in the fourth line of the seventh paragraph.