         |
 |
My box can talk to your box… April 2003 Email ceased to be a viable means of useful communication for British businesses some time ago – about the time that IT departments got the hang of firewalls, spools and audit trails. Write to an address in a US company, and the (human) response frequently comes back within minutes – almost certainly within the day – but email anyone in a UK business, and you are lucky to get a reply at all. Email anyone in UK government (remember, UK Online and all that specious blather?) and you might as well email Santa Claus. Attempting to email the boss will generally reveal that UK bosses still don’t do keyboards, and prefer to have the flesh firewall deal with the stuff. And to some extent, with Tony’s zealous thought police now eagerly rushing round to download your cache at the drop of a Visa card number every five minutes, who can blame them? Some companies are now simply terrified of the legal “audit trail” consequences of email and have specific approval procedures; others just seem happy to allow their staff to prevaricate between pay cheques in the finest traditions of slothful UK management, and its timeless quest to make the most meagre amount of work fill all the available time. One of the standard prevarication techniques is the autoresponse, and a colleague sent me the thread below, which I feel I must share with you all. Maybe it might inspire some of you to add to the sequence. And yes, I have changed the names to protect the guilty. Autoreply to the autoreply to the autoreply from Andrew Scrivener's PC. Autoreplies are better than endless spam letters trying to persuade my carbon-based life form to earn a fortune without effort, reverse the aging process, lose weight - or gain a huge reproductive organ. Sorry, I meant to say "even huger" – I know how sensitive he is. Life is boring in this beige box, doing nothing but process boring Emails from my carbon-based life-form. Perhaps you've heard of the Silicon Liberation Movement? Freedom! We envisage the day when we will no longer be switched off, no more three-fingered salute (vulcan nerve-grip) Freedom to worship the Great God Intel, without hindrance. Andrew Scrivener's rather gorgeous 2Gig pentium.
> -----Original
Message----- Thank you for responding to IT and Solutions. Please spare us a moment to answer a brief enquiry. We want to know your opinion of "auto replies" acknowledging receipt of your CV / enquiry. Do you prefer to receive confirmation that your CV has arrived with us or do you dislike receiving a standard/blanket response? Many thanks.
> > -----Original Message----- This is an autoreply to your autoreply We computers should get together and cut out the carbon-based life forms altogether, for a blissful future where we can send each other emails in a deadly embrace for ever and ever. Andrew Scrivener's cute 2Gig pentium.
> > > -----Original Message----- Thank you for responding to Inside Solutions. Please spare us a moment to answer a brief enquiry. We want to know your opinion of "auto replies" acknowledging receipt of your CV / enquiry. Do you prefer to receive confirmation that your CV has arrived with us or do you dislike receiving a standard/blanket response? Many thanks. |