Working in nonprofits for the past five years, I’ve come to appreciate that although my degree in English taught me to analyze sentences down to the bone, it did absolutely nothing to prepare me for the email avalanche that is, on most days, my job.
As a grant writer, I need information from other departments to write a grant: program details, financials, marketing collateral, statements from artists and executive leadership, budget line items. I send emails like: “Grant Info Request: FY22…” and “For Review: FY22 Annual Report.” Sometimes I bake for the office: “Baked Goods in Staff Kitchen.”
Those get the fastest responses.
If you have ever worked in a nonprofit, you are probably familiar with the way that this particular sector likes to mangle language. (And if you are, I send you sympathy.) Here are some of my current favorite nonprofit-isms:
“Let’s park it for now” means “We don’t have time to talk about this anymore, because the meeting is 60 minutes and we’re already at minute 40, but we want to come back to the topic at some point, which is probably in a later meeting where we still will not have all the time we need.”
“It’s not in my wheelhouse” means “I don’t know anything about it, or I am not supposed to know anything about it because it’s not in my job description, but I can’t flat-out say the request goes beyond ‘duties otherwise assigned,’ so I am going to invoke vaguely farm-esque imagery that somehow also would work at a carnival.”
“Duties otherwise assigned” usually means there is too much work for too few people, but the work has to happen, so you grow to be many more people. I write grants but pick up trash at donor events.
I have a real fondness for email-speak. Maybe that’s because I was raised as a frenetic people-pleaser and feel that it would be rude to say, “Look, I asked you for this a few weeks ago; it is now the deadline I gave you, what’s up?” Maybe it’s because I am A WOMAN IN THE WORKPLACE!—a trope that Reductress manages to simultaneously sustain and smash in its memes: “Gmail Auto-response Options Not Quite Capturing Woman’s Style of Self-effacement.”
Or maybe it’s both, in which case I should pen a scathing op-ed in which I make absolutely no new points, but feel really good about myself for 30 seconds. New York Times Editorial Board, my inbox is open! I will also throw in some lies about ectopic pregnancies to raise engagement!
In email-speak, I am forever “following up” or “circling back” or “touching base,” like a hiker deluded into thinking they have a tremendous instinct for direction. Touching base also brings outer space to my mind, which is fun: I am lost in a perpetual orbit around you, an avoidant moon. Or you’re Mars and I’m NASA, my vision board covered with interior design ideas for human-accommodating Martian bases.
But the all-time winner, the perpetual All-Star who is both a Gold Glove and Silver Slugger, who would be top of the record books if it weren’t for Barry Bonds or Sammy Sosa or A-Rod, which is to say for the 1990s—the shooting range.
SHOOTING YOU AN EMAIL! HOPE YOU HAVE THOSE PLASTIC EAR MUFFS!
It feels particularly American to implicitly invoke guns in a work environment and rarely give that a second thought about how maybe, we should say something different? Shouldn’t the Senate take action on gun control, common sense gun control, by banning this phrase, then sending thoughts and prayers? (I make this joke because rage, and grief, are not enough, at least not in this country.)
That we have accepted this phrase makes me wonder where it began—who shot the first email, and why it’s most likely a retired sheriff named Kevin.
Recently, on the excellent podcast Strict Scrutiny, I heard an ad for Sane, an app that works on most email platforms. According to Sane, the time for “inbox zero,” where you’ve read all the emails that come into your inbox, is over. Let tyranny reign—we can finally ignore each other more than we already do!
Sane automatically sorts important emails (the ad did not specify how the algorithm decides this) into your main inbox and shoves the rest into another inbox, ostensibly for you to look at later, when what’s important no longer matters.
Nothing about the endeavor strikes me as sanity-inducing. How will I rest easy knowing that Sane doesn’t care that a Nigerian prince is trying to reach me?
But then, I doubt that Sane shoots emails. Sane probably takes the emails out to coffee and nods sincerely when the emails cry into their lattes, “It really all stems from that moment in high school,” and Sane nods even more sincerely when it gently reminds the emails that it does charge by the minute, so maybe they could go into all the nitty-gritty about that particular trauma?
Inbox zero: what a lonely place to be. After you’ve read everything, responded to nothing—it’s just emptiness, which people sometimes mistake as mindfulness. “I have learned how to live, how to be in the world and of the world, and not just to stand aside and watch,” Sabrina Fairchild writes in a letter to her father, in the 1954 film that bears her name.
Following up, checking in, touching base, circling back, shooting—these are the phrases of desperate communication, outstretched hands hungry for contact. It’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” transposed into an office: there are no lovers, just people who spend an inordinate amount of time together and still do not know each other at all, let alone as fully human. Still they reach.
Obviously, this interpretation romanticizes what is deeply mundane for so many of us; what sucks our time and seemingly our souls. I would rather be writing about the spectacle that is the MLB Draft; I would rather be slathering freshly-made bread with salted butter (Kerrygold, please); and I would much rather be outside, with you, trying to stop the ice cream from melting sugar-spun gloves onto my hands.
That I am not doing those things when I send emails, and yet call emails poetry—that’s why I do it. We all need beauty.
Introducing a New Feature: Let Me Tell You About Gidget
Technically, Gidget is my boyfriend’s cat. But we’ve lived together for nearly four years now, and I have anointed myself as her step-mama, more specifically “Big Bitch Momma,” because that is what she thinks when I never feed her even though I do.
There will be a new photo in each issue.
Your turn! What’s your small good thing of the week? Are you as romantic about emails as I am? Or do you want to fling them into the sun?
A Continual Note of Gratitude
Like everything I have written since May 24, this was written during the 8AM EST session of The Writers’ Hour, an online hourly Zoom writing session hosted by the London Writer’s Salon. LWS is an online writing community so lovely and supportive that reminds me why I love writing in the first place.
1. Stop whoring out my cat for likes. She'll get used to the attention.
2. Thank you for reminding me to check my spam folder.
3. Now I want ice cream.
Thank you for your humour, thought, and wonderfully sidewinding style. Always a pleasure to read.
Gosh I related to this so very much but also felt swept away in the idea of turning emails into poetry. I am a "clear the inbox to get on with the day" kind of person which sometimes means 10am and sometimes means 7pm. I need a better system.
Thank you <3