Farewell to spam— Ethics, procrastination, and the auto-responder
Do you ever put off dealing with something annoying only to have it bite you later?
This post is for all of you who are too busy fighting the alligators to drain the swamp. When they are little, those workplace ‘gators are easily dismissed, but they can grow up to become a real menace. Trust me!
I recently returned from a vacation to find my email account an absolute mess. I had to contact my Internet service provider to get help with the spam settings and get my newly disabled business account back up and running. Absent a gargantuan IT budget, I almost missed my days in the Department of Defense, where such tasks are a matter of calling tech support and working on something else for a bit while a technophile does battle with the filter settings!
What to do? …I closed an old email account that I no longer use, which had been forwarded to my current account, tightened up the filters, and began the tedious task of blacklisting companies that routinely interrupt my workday with offers of Canadian pharmaceuticals and offers to help me find a bride from the far ends of the earth. I added more rules tied to keywords, some of which made me blush, others tame but way off base. Nope! Not looking for a knee brace, thankfully!
Really??? How did they get my demographic so wrong? How did anyone decide that sending ads for unwanted pharmaceuticals to my business email account was worth the effort?
I could almost picture a sleazy Al Capone look-alike in a tacky plaid suit, cigar in hand, laughing maniacally as he hit the send button 1,000 times from his darkened, dingy office… Mwahh ha ha ha!!! In reality, it was probably a dull-looking series of backroom servers using lists obtained from goodness knows where, certainly without my consent, but this version— “Al Techno-Capone,” appealed to my sense of having been wronged by the unscrupulous spammers. A face for my pain, perhaps…
I know I should have gotten help with this issue sooner. Early on it seemed easier to quickly mark the ads as junk and get back to work, rather than make the time to re-adjust my filters at the server level. So one by one, I would delete them and get back to the “real emails.” Soon, I was deleting them by the hundreds, frustrated that my email program’s filters did not appear to be “learning” as I tagged the same unwanted messages over and over again as junk.
Been there? Embarrassing, huh?
My point in sharing this “mea culpa” is to point out how a seemingly minor thing can escalate. I am not COMPLETELY technologically impaired, although my sons might argue otherwise. It just wasn’t where I wanted to put my time and energy. Weeding my technological garden was not a task I had put into my time management plan. So I let the wild spam plants go to seed— much to my chagrin.
Spam is sort of the leaky toilet of the electronic age. Ignore it at your peril, for the time that it steals from you drop by drop early on is just a warning sign of the deluge to come.
When it comes to ethics, we often talk about the “slippery slope,” where a small compromise leads to big trouble over time as we unwittingly form habits by making a series of less than ideal choices. Ignoring little time-wasters and efficiency drains can have big effects over the long haul, leading to a real mess at an inopportune time. One can use the “frog in boiling water” analogy as well. I do not advocate the torturing of reptiles or any other creature, to be sure, but the gist is this. It is said that if the temperature of the water a frog is sitting in is turned up gradually, he may not notice it until the heat is dangerously high, threatening his survival.
That’s how this spam issue was for me. As I worked to accomplish as much as possible in a short period of time, mastering efficiency in other areas of my work-life, I let this little nuisance grow into a big monster. There are so many nagging problems like this that pop up repeatedly in our work and our lives.
We all know the all-to-true saying, “Ignore your health and it will go away.” The same can be said of customers, friendships, and professional relationships— not to mention functional email servers! Those who practice yoga regularly know this to be true of asana practice and meditation as well. Gradual progress comes from regular practice, while backsliding is a given when we neglect to honor this healthy habit. Skip practicing for a few days and see what happens to your flexibility, strength, and peace of mind. (Better yet, don’t! Just take my word for it and keep your positive patterns in tact.)
I am reminded of Aristotle’s ideas about ethics and habits, how our habits are closely linked to our happiness and virtue. Perhaps it is time to cultivate my own habits a bit more, to include dealing with those nagging little problems rather than putting them off. To be sure, there is nothing virtuous about procrastination, something my email horror show reminded me of this week! It just goes to show that we can become very efficient in some aspects of our jobs, but we must remain vigilant when it comes to those little time wasters that have the potential to grow into full blown, bonafide problems!
So I learned a thing or two about my spam filters this week, but the real lesson was a whole lot bigger.
How about you?
Can you take a break from fighting those alligators in order to drain the swamp?
What little monsters are tugging at your sleeve today that may clobber you tomorrow?
Can you cultivate habits that keep your in-box functional and avoid being derailed for a day by something silly?
Copyright Gly Solutions, LLC
