There's a lot of whining these days about the truckloads, the veritable landslides of email that today's information workers (TM) suffer each morning when they log on (TM).
I don't suffer such deluges and when I do, my usual response is just to delete a few. Or a few hundred.
No. The kinds of email epics I have known are a joy of the written word.
They include the late-night tailoring of a client email from "bitchy" to "charming", a slow honing of sharp edges to rounded, graspable curves along with a sprinkling of sundry smiley faces.
They include the serialised dramatic reportage of what seems on the face of it to be an ordinary task that blows out into a months-long real-world ordeal that demands—yes, demands—to be shared with someone I know will find it amusing.
They include small portions of the multi-media, multi-part, sentence-snippet-by-irrelevant-sentence-snippet communications I have with various friends who, while erudite, witty and intelligent, appear incapable of stringing together a coherent thought in the written form.
And they include actual, take-it-in-turns stories written over weeks, and over email, in boring desk jobs where one could easily turn out half a novel in one's mountainous downtime, in installments interleaved with those of a suitably bored and thesaurus-armed partner in dissentful thinking.
This, my friends, is epic email at its best.
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