Sartre Was Wrong

I love Sartre. I consider his Essay on Existentialism my bible (not in the sense that I think it was authored by a divine being, but in the sense that it steers me toward a life I can be proud of, even if I don't always make it there). But when he said "hell is other people," he clearly didn't have all the facts.

He didn't, for example, work where I work. I do not work in hell, and I work with some awesome people. But my job is hell-adjacent, because it requires e-mail. I love e-mail, and I think it's awesome, but a company that doesn't teach its employees to use e-mail is gonna have trouble. I have many, many colleagues whose inboxes are overflowing--I have actually seen at this job an icon that I did not know existed in Outlook--a little disc that appears next to a message, effectively saying, "I thought that since you were never ever going to look at this again, I would archive it for you--if you want to see it, it will take me a minute, because I honestly thought you had forgotten it was here." I didn't even know there was such a thing. I have seen it in my colleagues' inboxes.

Think of that icon and all that it means, and then think of all the CYA e-mail that gets sent in the average business day. Abandon hope, all ye who open Outlook. In vain will ye strive to keep your inbox to one page.

Which is why this should be compulsive viewing at my company, and probably at every corporation on earth.