The Way I See It: Reply to All

By Dennis Lane
I forgot to slide last month.
Despite best efforts from the Howard County Department of Public Works, I totally screwed up on the slide thing.
"I wonder why they haven't picked up our trash yet."
I had diligently put out the garbage can at the crack of dawn that morning, as I do every Tuesday morning. It was now almost dinner time and the trash still hadn't been picked up.
"I guess it's because yesterday was a holiday and they got a little behind today trying to catch up," I said to Denise.
Possibly. It just so happened that this particular Tuesday was the Tuesday after Memorial Day.
Ally, our college girl home for the summer, walked in on the conversation. "You forgot about the slide," she said.
The slide?
"It's right here on the refrigerator," she chirped, while removing the oversized colored postcard from the refrigerator door.
Sure enough, there it was, in blue, green and black type on a tan background: "Trash, Recycling & Yardwaste Collection New Holiday Slide Schedule."
It even had tables with arrows with every day of a normal collection week pointing to the adjusted holiday week "slide" day.
I totally missed that. But that isn't what I really wanted to write about this month. In fact, last month Paul Skalny told me that he had an idea for my column. Paul has suggested a few topics to me over the years, which has been great because we often share the same warped perspective on everyday annoyances.
This time the focus of his ire was the "reply to all" feature on e-mails.
"You know what drives me crazy?" he queried, before answering his own question. "People who constantly use the 'reply to all' button in e-mails."
That dreaded "reply to all" button.
You know what I'm talking about. You receive an e-mail as part of a large group list announcing a meeting or something. Instead of just replying to the sender, some recipients feel compelled to share their response with all of the recipients of the e-mail. These folks go straight for the "reply to all" button and share things like, "I can't make the meeting because I'm taking my dog to be neutered that day."
Thanks for sharing.
Someone will inevitably "respond to all" that this meeting conflicts with another meeting they need to be in.
"I didn't know that meeting had been rescheduled" yet another will respond to all.
The company wags will often jump on an opportunity like this. They'll respond to all that "certain people weren't told of that rescheduling intentionally."
And on and on the all responding will go, kind of like some small-scale Twitter.
I think there should be some kind of requirement, regulation or royal edict that the "reply to all" button always be highlighted, like a warning sign, in red and yellow stripes. Every time you hit "reply to all" another window would automatically pop up and ask if you're sure that's what you want to do.
I'm serious. This is no small problem.
Late last year, the State Department e-mail system almost crashed as a direct result of a "reply to all" e-mail running amuck through the system. According to a report by Matthew Lee on the Huffington Post blog, "American diplomats have been told they may be punished for sending mass responses after an e-mail storm nearly knocked out one of the State Department's main electronic communications systems."
Ironically, the situation was made even worse by angry recipients who replied to all - demanding to be taken off the "reply to all" routing.
Most demanded to be removed from the list while others used "reply to all" to tell their co-workers, in often less than diplomatic language, to stop responding to the entire group, the officials said.
Some then compounded the problem by trying to recall their initial replies, which generated another round of messages to the group, they said.
Sheesh.
It's not just the public sector that is having this problem. This past January, Andrew Carwood, the chief information officer at Nielsen Media Research, sent a message to all employees that they were eliminating the "reply to all" function from the company's Outlook e-mail system.
In his message, a copy of which was published by Dylan Stableford on Folio, he highlighted the positive effects of this seemingly draconian action. It would, he claimed "require us to copy only those who need to be involved in an e-mail conversation" and "reduce non-essential messages in mailboxes, freeing up our time as well as server space."
Though it may sound a bit harsh at first, I completely understand the frustration that led to this. I imagine it is the same way the folks at the Department of Public Works felt after taking great pains to inform the citizens of the new holiday week "slide" trash schedule.
After all the postcards and press releases, I'm willing to bet that on that Tuesday, after Memorial Day, they got bombarded with calls from guys like me wondering why their trash hadn't been picked up.

Dennis Lane blogs about stuff around here at www.wordbones.com.