Suzy Says

I have suspected for a while that my office e-mail system, which is routed through the head office in Washington D.C. (where censorship begins for all citizens of this great country), has been filtering out mail from yahoo and hotmail, and other usual suspects. I realize that the point of this is to minimize or eliminate personal e-mails, but the narrow minds that came up with this concept failed to take into account that some people do send and receive work related e-mails from their personal e-mail accounts.

Yes, it’s somewhat unethical to send and receive personal e-mails at work, and to visit non-work related Web sites, but is it really any worse than long lunches or gossiping in the halls for extended periods or chatting on the phone to your boyfriend? These occur in any given office on a daily basis, and I submit that limited amounts of e-mailing or blog reading is no more detrimental to work than these behaviors.

And if you are going to censor employees’ e-mail, have the courtesy to inform them that you are doing so. I do think we have a right to know that we are being censored. But I only began to figure it out when friends with yahoo or other taboo addresses asked me if I had gotten their e-mails, and I never had. Final proof was provided by my husband, who had sent me a quick e-mail which included, among other news, the fact that he still, after more than a week of having the flu in the middle of summer, “felt like shit”. This offensive e-mail, which would undoubtedly have caused me to swoon at my desk from its appalling vulgarity, thereby costing even more valuable work time, was returned to him with the following as its SUBJECT LINE:

Your message did not reach its intended recipient (Explicit Language(shit))

And with this little billet doux in the body of the e-mail:

[Employer Name] filters inbound messages from the Internet in an effort to reduce the administrative burden caused by non-business related, explicit language, or unsolicited (SPAM) messages to our employees. The message you have sent has been quarantined by one of those filters. If your message should not have been quarantined, please notify us by REPLYING to this message.

Proof at last of the filtering, unbeknownst to us worker bees. And, let me get this straight: “shit” is too offensive to be in the body of an e-mail, but it’s OK to broadcast it in the subject line? OK, just checking.