It's In The Email Thread
Just read the the thread
Hey,
Just saw your question about tomorrow’s meeting re: who owns slides 33-37. It would take me a millisecond to give you a name, but I’m not going to do that, because the answer’s in the thread.
You’re not an intern anymore—you’re an associate, and you can’t be wasting my time with questions when you can figure out the answer yourself.
This would have been so easy for you. Just scroll down past my response and past your email to me.
Perfect, now click the three little horizontal dots to expand the thread. Ok, not that one. There were two little buttons with three little horizontal dots, and one of them expands my eight-line email signature culminating in the inspirational quote, “LIFE: It’s what you make it.”
Yeah, you’re right—there is no attribution for that quote. Want to know why? That’s because I said it, buddy. You can just do that when you’re a manager. LIFE: It’s what you make it.
You’re going to see that quote nineteen more times before you get to the email that addresses who owns slides 33-37.
All right, so click the bottom set of three little horizontal dots, and that’s going to expand more of the email thread.
Now pay attention here: I didn’t say the rest of the email thread—I said more of the email thread. This thing’s been going on for three weeks now, and I’ll be honest, there’s a lot of chaff in there.
There’s going to be 5-6 exchanges with the client where I make fun of them for how the Seattle Mariners have been playing. That’s called relationship building, and it’s why I get to tell you what to do.
All right, at this point, the thread should be about half the width of your screen. Each time you expand it, a vertical line should indent across the page and the replies will get narrower and the formatting will get more and more difficult to read. That’s how you know you’re only ten to twelve more “expand thread” clicks away.
Ok, you’re getting there. You’re now to the part of the thread where people keep alluding to who owns those slides as if it’s a settled matter, so can’t be far now.
The thread is now a single character wide, and it takes you five flicks of your thumb just to get through my email signature.
Sorry, what? You got to the end and you still don’t see it?
That is fully my bad—now that you mention it, I think slide ownership was broken down in a different email chain. I’m just about to head out to the client dinner, but will get that forwarded to you by eleven or so. You da man!
Notes:
Why did I write this? I am a proud user of Microsoft Outlook, whose user interface was designed by graduates of the American military’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” team, and I’ve spent many waking hours “looking through the thread.”
What I’m reading: I’ve been spending a lot of time reading Wikipedia pages about Northern New Jersey lately (The Stars—they’re just like us!), and the footnotes of various articles have led me to some good books. I just read The Short And Tragic Life Of Robert Peace, a 2014 book by Jeff Hobbs. Hobbs and Peace were college roommates at Yale, class of 2002 I think. Peace was murdered in 2011, and the book is Hobbs’s attempt to make sense of it—he interviews family, friends, and anyone in Peace’s life. It is a heartbreaking but well-told story. I am also now reading An American River, a book by Mary Bruno about the Passaic River in NJ (its subtitle reads, in part, “From Paradise to Superfund”), in which she gives a brief history of Newark and of the specific, very bad pollution in the city’s Ironbound neighborhood (the Superfund site is the former Diamond Shamrock plant that produced Agent Orange during the Vietnam war—a byproduct was the extremely toxic dioxin that still sits in the sediment at the bottom of the river. A look at the EPA site for the project reveals that Occidental Chemical Corporation, the site’s current owner, has conducted a study for remediation, and that the “EPA expects to use this information to propose a cleanup plan for Newark Bay in 2026. Once these various river and bay cleanups have been completed, it will still be many years before the levels of contamination in fish and crab have decreased to levels that are considered safe to eat.” Thankfully, the EPA capped the site of the old factory, and they must have done a great job containing the pollutants, because if you look at it now on Google Maps, you’ll see that it’s right next to a HelloFresh distribution center (HelloDioxin!).