Dick, The Send Receipt Master

Two quick points before we get to today’s funny.

• Thanks for putting up with all of the football over the last (gasp) nine posts. We here at YAB find the Dueling Previews to be a challenging assignment, as well as one of our better works of the year. If you aren’t a fan of television or football, thanks for sticking with us. As the great Ed Rooney of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off once exclaimed. We will do it. We will do it NINE TIMES.
• I know that for those reading this on IE that you’ve seen some crappy code in several of the more recent posts. My apologies; we just switched to Firefox and Microsoft Word isn’t playing nice. Way to stick up for dear old Microsoft Father, Kid Word. We’ll get that resolved soon.
  

(Thanks for the great segue, Intro Chris. Not a problem, Column Chris.)

99 out of 100 of you are sitting at your desk right now in a corporate environment that lives and dies by Microsoft Office. It’s not that you don’t have a preference in your productivity software; it’s that the powers-that-be for which you work does not. Microsoft grow so fast and so large that soon it became clear that those trying to make it in today’s working world would crash and burn the first time they sent a proposal to their customers in WordPerfect format. It’s like showing up for a pick-up basketball game wearing Converse Chuck Taylor’s – you may think it looks cool, but ultimately, they will be rupture your Achilles heel.

(As for that other 1 out of 100, you’re not a Microsoft rebel. We just assumed you’re standing at your desk.)

One of the nicest features in Microsoft Outlook is the Read Receipt. Of course, it’s a bit of a misnomer. By practice, the read receipt is meant to indicate to you when the recipient on the other end, has in fact, read your e-mail. Of course, there are a few preventative factors that Microsoft fails to consider. First, it registers receipt to you only when the e-mail has been opened; not necessarily read. Second, your recipient may not know how to read. Regardless of literacy, Microsoft will send you that note that your e-mail has been read. You then pick up the phone to call your colleague on his newfound ability to process words and sentences, only to insult his heavy burden of illiteracy. Jerk.

‘Course I will Rob, no problem.

But today I’d like to educate you all about the opposite of the read receipt. In my office, its converse is alive and well, in the form of one of our junior staff members. People, I give you the send receipt. You’ve been warned.

No problem at all. I’ll tell him the next time I see him. Definitely.

The send receipt exists in the computers of only the most proactive and naïve members of our workforce. You see, e-mail operates differently from regular U.S. Mail. When an e-mail is sent, the e-mail arrived in the recipients inbox at a near instant clip. This inbox is located on a computer screen, likely within 18 inches of the face of the recipient. By this clever means of proximity, the recipient will likely know that they have received your e-mail, at that same near instant clip. The U.S. Mail is delivered into a mailbox out by the road, or on the first floor of your apartment building. You don’t know for sure if the mail has come, and if a certain letter is or is not in that daily mail run. You’ll have to wait until you feel like checking it, or some pen pal calls you on the phone to direct you to your nearest correspondence collection depot, that metal box that oncoming traffic comes dangerously close to destroying on a daily basis.

In e-mail, that pen pal phone call is a send receipt.

I've ah... got some other stuff to tell him anyway, so it's no problem.

So when my junior staff member sends me an e-mail, he gets up from his chair and walks the 20 feet into my office to tell me that he has sent me the e-mail (which I just read) and explains its content and intent to be in purpose. Aren’t we defeating some purpose here? And the thing is, there’s NOTHING I can do about it. I can respond really quickly, sure, but he’s already halfway to Chrisville when I hit send. I could meet him halfway in the hallway and explain, “Hey, I just sent you an e-mail. It’s to thank you for the information you just provided me in your e-mail.” Instead, we meet at my desk, and I am trapped.

I’ll just tell him about, you know, Laura, when I tell him the other stuff.

And as you may have guessed from the interspersed Todd Louiso dialogue from High Fidelity, each of these send receipt conversations ends with a recap of everything we had discussed in the past 12 seconds. It’s painful. Phillies bullpen painful. Jose Mesa with the bases loaded painful. Navy Seals painful.

So I ask the Microsoft gurus in the audience: how do I turn off Send Receipt?