Mailing Lists

Most of my readers have probably worked at some large company or another at some point in their lives. Which means that they should be more than aware of the ease with which the upper echelons of management are apt to use the "Reply All" button.

Now stop for a moment, and spare a thought for those of us who are at school with the next generation of the upper echelons of management. A school which very kindly integrates lots and lots of distributions lists under Outlook's address book. You might think high GMAT scores and general levels of high intelligence would mean people know how to use these things. Sadly not. Not a day goes by without some idiotic mail exchange involving who knows how many people e-mailing everybody and their brother about something utterly irrelevant.

My pet hate last week was a saga of about 20 e-mails emailed to the entire class by some guy getting together a group buy of business cards for people, and thus saving the princely sum of 5EUR. Sadly, it looked like it would be too much work to combine all the e-mails of the minority who consider this a worthwhile use of time, and so the distribution list was used. Yesterday's flurry involved a protracted vote where people e-mailed the entire school their Instant Messenger application preference. Woe betide the e-mail servers of the businesses that end up hiring the leaders of tomorrow.