Hiding Behind Email

In a recent conversation with an engineer, email was given as the reason for the slower than usual response to a technical problem. It seems that the company who had supplied a faulty part accepted voice mail (and we all know how well that works) or email. Anyone can ignore the flashing light that says you have a voice message until the time or mood strikes you, but an email, after it has been sorted from spam and junk mail, can sit on your screen for days. However, the frustration of listening to a recording that says ‘your business is important to us’ quickly sends one scurrying to the keyboard.

The thing with a voice in your ear is that somehow we feel obliged to answer when spoken to – even if there is only a digital representation of a person begging for help in the earpiece. Email is just so much less personal, that it is easy to say ‘later’ or even worse, forward it to someone else. The message may travel at the speed of light – until it stops at another mailbox. Where it waits and waits and waits.

While getting technical information, specifications and drawings has become so much more accurate and faster, the engineer said that service issues have typically added another day or two when using email.

In this age of the global village, getting an answer or a repair can be complicated. The computer control board, in this case, came from a Toronto company who ordered it from their head office in Georgia who had sourced the board from Singapore. Chances are that they had the board made somewhere else, but that is as far as the email service went.

Fortunately, even before we had the right board (first one faulty, second one wrong specs), all was resolved by a local technician who had the skill to wire in a subset to the controller that worked to keep the HVAC going. Maybe if it had been minus 30 in Georgia or Singapore, we might have had a little more understanding about our urgency.

I jokingly asked the engineer if any of the delay in the States might have been caused by our former Prime Minister doing his Bush-bashing at the time. I was a little surprised to see him take the question seriously. Maybe some engineer’s assistant in Georgia followed the BBC news and took a little umbrage with us. Or maybe he got just one too many emails from some Canuck who thought he or she could poke some fun at the American President.

After all, you never know who is reading your email, do you?