Email — A Staple Busi­ness Tool

In today’s busi­ness world most people have the staple tools needed to con­duct busi­ness with other people on a daily basis.

Such tools inev­it­ably include the oblig­at­ory diary (elec­tronic or oth­er­wise), a pen, a note­pad (elec­tronic or oth­er­wise), a tele­phone (land­line and mobile), a car or some other form of vehicle and of course a com­puter of a descrip­tion with an inter­net con­nec­tion and asso­ci­ated email account.

Fif­teen years ago you could have prob­ably omit­ted the email account for some folk and any con­nec­tion to the Inter­net would have been on dial-up rather than broad­band. Twenty years ago pagers were the ‘away from the office’ com­mu­nic­a­tion tool of choice for many unless you were either a Yup­pie or a keen early adop­ter who owned a mobile phone. Com­puters whilst becom­ing more com­mon place, hadn’t quite pen­et­rated through to every nook and cranny of busi­ness life as they do today and Lotus Smart­suite ruled the roost when it came to office soft­ware applications.

Today, tech­no­logy has spread through­out the busi­ness world and is not purely the domain of early adapt­ive geeks. You don’t need me to tell you that I’m sure.

Take a straw-poll of busi­ness bod­ies in a room to find out who uses a Black­berry™, iPhone™ or other type of smart-phone to email and surf whilst on the move and I’ll wager that most of the hands will go up. Sim­il­arly, note­book com­puters and net­books are out­selling desktop com­puters by a large mar­gin and mobile inter­net access is com­mon place through 3G and WiFi cov­er­age. Tweet­ing and mes­saging through the social net­work­ing sites (SNS) is the new kid on the block and are deemed to be a more flex­ible and super­ior sub­sti­tute for email by some.

Phew!

Voice-Mail Hell

So I was amazed at the out­come which res­ul­ted from being trapped in the hell of a voice-mail loop with an asso­ci­ate of mine. You know the score; someone leaves you mes­sage on your voice­mail, you return the call, miss­ing the per­son but get­ting diver­ted to their own voice­mail and so the circle con­tin­ues. Nightmare!

This went on for a couple of days with this par­tic­u­lar bloke, both of us listen­ing to a one sided mes­sage from the other. Frus­tra­tion gradu­ally creep­ing into the tone of our delivery.

So, as one does, I thought; “I know, I’ll send this guy an email with the inform­a­tion he requires!” Out came his busi­ness card, “ah yes an email address”. Tap, tap, tap! Gone!

That should illi­cit a response.

Er, no! Nothing!

Another day goes by without con­tact, but at least I was safe in the know­ledge that he had the inform­a­tion he needed on email.

I don’t do email

Then, one morn­ing the phone goes. It’s him, sound­ing angry now!

“In my defense”, I retor­ted, “because I couldn’t get to speak to you — I dropped you an email instead. Did you get it?”

“I don’t do email!” bounced back the reply. “I will check it later and get back to you if I didn’t”. I called him later regard­less to check. Yes, he’d got it and was happy with the details I’d emailed to him two days previously.

“That’s okay, we got there in the end.”

So in a world where email is a staple com­mod­ity of busi­ness, this fel­low obvi­ously still lives in the late 1980’s. Just ima­gine how more effi­cient he could become and less frus­trated into the bar­gain, if he just “did email.”

Which beg­gars the ques­tion of course; if the sub­ject in this post “doesn’t do email”: then WTF does he have an email account for?

Now tex­ting, there’s another story!

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