I Lead a Charmed Existence

Unless you’re brutal with the delete key, your email inbox fills up pretty fast. Especially if I’m one of your friends!

At least all my material is original.

The problem is that, even among legitimate work emails, many defy categorization. I tend to keep anything dealing with work in progress sitting in my inbox, but there are also things that just don’t fit in any of the myriad different email folders I have set up. You could create a different folder for every single email you get, but that would sort of defeat the purpose.

Every so often, though, you get an email that demands a folder of its very own. I received such an email today.

At USDM in Corpus, Annette once wrote an email to Tricia and me, firmly instructing us to be very precise in composing a particular sales proposal. The prospective client was a government agency, so the requirements had to be individually and specifically addressed. So Annette told us to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb and pay very, very, very careful attention to every detail. But Tricia had to forward the email to me, because Annette had absent-mindedly addressed it to her twice, and left me off.

I created an email folder called “Irony.” It was actually pretty full by the time I left.

Today we had a meeting about a project a subset of my group is working on. I’m involved, but only on the side, helping out when other duties allow; for the others in this sub-group, this project is the primary focus. Meetings with the panicmonger are one of the less uplifting aspects of my job. I wouldn’t really call her a particularly upbeat person. I wouldn't call Genghis Khan a pacifist, either.

She sent out an email after the meeting to everyone else on the project, cc’ing me, with the subject line “Lets start daily meetings from tomorrow” and assigning everyone else on the project, except me, a fifteen-minute block of time to meet with her, one on one, every day, every day, to go over project status.

Everybody else. Except me.

I created a special folder for it in my email. Guess what it’s called?