We Live in a World Depicted by Office Space - Part 1

It's true, my life is very much like the cult classic, Office Space. In fact, the movie was on TV on Sunday and I ended up watching a short portion of it. And then it reaffirmed the fact that I'm not much different from Peter Gibbons. OK, let's take a step back: I'm not going to flake out like he did, but I feel the same way sometimes. I say this in a humorous way, because let's be serious... no one in the working world in their mid-20's really likes what they are doing. If you do, please stand up and name yourself, because no one I know fits in this category.

As a result, we have a 3 part series beginning tonight on work-related stuff. I'm not going to go into too much detail because I like to think that I have more common sense than that. Additionally, I'd rather not be collecting unemployment so soon because I wrote something in my blog that ended up getting me canned. I won't do that -- I promise. Let's just keep it light and humorous.

Tonight's topic: Email signatures. (Thanks again to Owen for the idea. He claims that he "hates them" and that I "should too and write about why I hate them".) I thought about it and had to first convince myself if I truly dislike email signatures. They seem so innocent and are intended for good use. Before I go any farther, let's make sure we're all in line. I forget that not all of my readers are office dwellers like myself and Owen.

So what is an email signature? Its that set of lines that show up every time you write or respond to an email. Typically, it has pertinent contact information like your name (as if people would forget who sent them an email between the time they opened it up and the time they reached the end of your message), and your address. Addresses are worthless in my case because in my 20 months of working, I've never sent anything in the way of snail mail. Besides that, many of the people that I correspond with are actually in my building. If I want to look up where they sit, I can check our online directory. Bottom line: I don't care if you're in Atlanta, Baltimore, San Francisco, or the cube by the Pepsi machine... I'm not sending anything to you in the mail. Oh and by the way, I don't deal with any outside customers, so they wouldn't need my address either. Waste of time.

How about phone numbers? This bugs me too because people never refer back to emails to see what your phone number is. They'll check the directory (again) or just ask you. Many times, it's jut easier to ask someone what their extension via conversation on our internal Instant Messaging program than opening up an old email to check. Furthermore, people in my company often put 2 forms of the phone number: For external use (with the normal area code + 7 digits) or for internal use (with what we call "tie lines" where you can reach anyone in the company, worldwide, using a 7 digit code). Yeah, this works real well. I tried to call someone in England once and the "tie line" number didn't work. So I tried calling with the international area codes and it didn't work either. I got fed up and just emailed the person anyway. This kind of gets off of my topic, but while we were talking about phone numbers, this came to mind.

Fax numbers. That's another one. I've never made the effort to send snail mail to anyone at work, why would I fax anything to them? It's much easier just to send a softcopy file in an email as an attachment, or if they absolutely need an actual print-out, I can drop it off at their desk. Am I faxing anything to anyone? No. In fact, fax machines don't like me. I have a tough enough time with the copier. I once got a "PC Load Letter" error message and I though the Xerox machine was punking me. I'm not kidding. I like technology, but office technology is more trouble than it's worth. Regardless, I don't need your fax number so please don't bother having it in your email sig.

Most will contain the job title. In my case, all it says is "Financial Analyst". Whether or not that persuades or dissuades anyone from replaying and following through on my requests is beyond me. As a staff person, it doesn't really matter to me what your job title is because I'll still have to respond to your request. Maybe someday when I'm the CFO, I can look at a request for information, see that this person is just some staff person, and ignore it. Granted I'm too nice to do that, but the option is always there.

At the bottom, some even put their email address. Why? You just sent me a friggin email, and if I need to reply to your message, the smart guys who programmed the email functions put in this nifty little button called "Reply". Our internal system allows you to just type someone's name and their email address pops up along with it. And even if you have a common name like John Smith, I can look you up in the online directory and find your email address there. No need to put it in your signature.

Wow, look at all of this stuff you probably don't need, but include anyway. Granted, sometimes it is nice to have this detail at hand. For example, you receive an email from someone and you need to contact them right away. It necessitates that you pick up the phone before you even close out the email. In this case, just look at the screen and there's the phone number staring right at you. Wonderful, we've found one instance.

Quotes. You don't find too many people with quotes in their email signature, probably because people are lazy and don't bother. The ones I've seen are the typical, "Shoot for the moon, and even if you miss, you'll still land among the stars." Beautiful. But after a while, I don't need to read that quote over and over again each time you send me something electronically. Someone needs to invent an add-in that changes your quote every time you send an email. That would be exciting. It's like a fortune cookie. "Oh, Bob sent me an email, I wonder what his email signature quote says this time!" It'd add a little bit of mystery to your day.

This reminds me of two of my co-workers who wanted to use a Wedding Crashers quote: "Rule #76: No Excuses. Play Like a Champion!" in the email signature. I thought it'd be a good idea and sounds harmless enough that no one would think badly of it. Speaking of oddball quotes, I found a site that has plenty of them, so you might want to choose one of these the next time you rearrange your email sig.

My favorite are:

- A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
- Accomplishing the impossible means only the boss will add it to your regular duties.
- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
- I thought I wanted a career, turns out I just wanted paychecks.
- Quitters never win, and winners never quit, but those who never quit AND never win are idiots.
- Sorry - yesterday was the deadline for all complaints.
- The best part about procrastination is that you are never bored, because you have all kinds of things that you should be doing.

So there you have it. Email signatures. Everyone at work has one and they all look the same. They provide information that we either don't need or could get from another source. Really, it just takes up space in your email that otherwise wouldn't be used. With those words being in there, your message may be 1 or 2 KB larger and thus clogging up my inbox. Now I have some reason to be annoyed!

I'm not sure what's more amazing about this rant: the fact that I convinced myself to dislike email signatures just so I could follow up on Owen's blog idea, or the fact that I was able to write up some much analysis on 5 lines of text in an everyday email. Unbelievable.

As the famous line from Billy Madison goes, "Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to [this]." As long as I provide some entertainment to my fellow office dwellers, then I think my work here is complete.