No thanks. Thank you.

Being the nice, polite middle-class boy that I am, I was brought up on the principle that courtesy costs nothing, and that I should always mind my Ps and Qs.

Now I'm in my 40s, and mandated by gender predetermination to be in a semi-permanent state of curmudgeon, I have found that "Thanks!" is not always the catch-all of polite appreciation.

As an employee of a large company I have discovered that there is one situation where such gratitude expressed will actually have me pulling upon the red handle marked FOR USE ONLY IN MOMENTS OF MIDDLE-AGED RAGE. I refer to the practice of using the 'Reply All' e-mail button to say, to just a single person (but copied to a cast of millions - including me) "Thanks!".

Being cc'd on an e-mail from one person to another is rarely more than attempted indemnification: "I've copied him/her, therefore he/she can consider themselves informed/looped in/involved". However, when the e-mail only says "Thanks!", the copied recipient has merely become a spectator of the most irrelevant, inconsequential and pointless of declarations. In terms of likelihood to raise one's duster in the workplace, it is beaten only by having to listen to the loud end of someone else's phone conversation. Which is a rant to unleash another time.

E-mail has, however, replaced conversation in many working environments. Few of us office drones will have escaped receiving an e-mail from someone sitting just three feet away or on the other side of a very thin wall. And, worse, when you're on the periphery of a lengthy e-mail exchange between an entire group of people, you end up wondering why that those expensive meeting rooms with video conferencing facilities had been installed, as your inbox fills up with patience-sapping, life's too short-reminding back-and-forthery.

E-mail is too convenient, and in the era of the BlackBerry dispatches are tossed off with careless abandon, at all times of the day or night. How different from the days of "Take a letter, Miss Jones".

With this ease comes the volume: last year the Internet handled almost 110 trillion e-mails. Many of them ended up in my Inbox, it would appear.

Unlike the kitchen pedal bin, which only informs you it has reached capacity when you bother to investigate that unplaceable odor wafting through the house, the message “YOUR MAILBOX IS ALMOST FULL” is a more terrifying warning of impending doom for the desk warrior reliant on an active communications pipeline. But imagine, for a moment, what it would be like to have this digital umbilical removed. Imagine having to actually, you know, talk to people, face-to-face, in the same room...

A few years ago Scottish researchers found that over a third of workers had become stressed by the daily volume of incoming e-mail and, worse, by the obligation to respond to it.

They felt that e-mail had become a distraction, that they were checking their Inbox 30 or 40 times an hour for new arrivals. That study took place five years ago, when ownership of smartphones was miniscule. Now, when even teenagers are hunched over BlackBerrys, no-doubt co-ordinating the next inner-city riot, e-mail is everywhere. Soon it will be impossible to go anywhere without e-mail catching up with you. There are cars in development that will offer you in-car e-mail, Facebook and Twitter (which will make for some pretty interesting insurance claims) and even fridges which will be able to say "You've got mail!" while also reminding you of the fact you're out of milk and houmous. So it has to stop. Or at least be curtailed.

To their absolute credit, several companies and their CEOs have taken initiatives to introduce an alternative e-mail culture in their organizations. Nine years ago, John Cauldwell, owner of the mobile phone retailer Phones4U took the radical step of banning staff from using e-mail altogether, arguing that his 2,500 staff were spending too much time handling e-mail and not enough time dealing with customers. "I saw that email was insidiously invading Phones4U so I banned it immediately," he said at the time. "Management and staff were beginning to show signs of being constrained by email proliferation - the ban brought an instant, dramatic and positive effect."

It's an idea that was picked up last year by London-based fashion PR agency Push, which banned any e-mail activity on Tuesdays to encourage account executives to use the phone more. Push didn't ban electronic communications altogether: in establishing Tuesdays as "T-Days", the agency ruled that staff could use only the telephone and Twitter (geddit?) to speak to journalists, clients and colleagues. Still, not a bad idea.

Last year Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos - a company which runs IT services for large corporations - picked up the Phones4U mantle by launching an 18-month program to eradicate internal e-mail altogether in a bid to achieve "best management practices". Breton's rationale was that only 10% of the 200 e-mails employees received on average every day had any use, which meant that the reading time associated with the other 90%, plus the minute or so it takes to return to work after looking at an e-mail of no great value, was time lost from more important activities.

As with any technological advance, e-mail has it's place. But as a working tool, it has its drawbacks. When more and more people admit to checking their work e-mail while on holiday for no other reason than to reduce the pileup of unread messages when they return to the office, something is clearly amiss. 25 years ago would you have gone into the office every day during Christmas to check for unopened letters or faxes? Of course not.

Other tools are out there which do the job of e-mail just as well: Atos, for example, is replacing e-mail with a combination of a Facebook-style social network and the dear old telephone.

In other companies, Twitter-like applications have been developed, which have the added advantage of encouraging workers to be brief. Given that time is, arguably, the most precious commodity we all have, a carefully crafted 140-character message instead of a lengthy, stream-of-conscious braindump sent to one and cc'd to several hundred more would not only get to the point, but would be the kindest act of humanity one worker could do for another.

And speaking of humanity, let me leave you with this thought: a single e-mail has a carbon footprint of 0.04g, and an e-mail with a PowerPoint presentation attached to it weighs in at 0.4g of CO2. Worth remembering that, next time you e-mail the colleague sat opposite you...

Skirting the RIM of Hell

Hello everyone. My name is Simon, and I used to be an addict.

I was using morning, noon and night. It was the first thing I needed when I woke, last thing I did before I went to bed. Sometimes I didn't go to bed at all, and continued through the night.

However, I sought help and sorted myself out, and that's why I'm here today to tell the story. I successfully rejected part of my life that was spiraling out of control with, frankly, only one outcome.

It is now ten months since I gave up my BlackBerry.


Today I'm completely clean. True, I have an iPhone, which sort of works as a phone and has all the non-phone things you expect these days. From a phone, of course. And although they say the first 100 days of sobriety are the hardest, these last ten months of abstinence have been relatively easy.

For a start, I no longer panic at the sight of a little red LED winking at me; I don't suffer spikes in blood pressure caused by the clanging chime of doom that annnounces a new missive; and my spine is returning to normal curviture, as I am no longer finding myself hunched over like an early 1970s prog rock guitarist.

That said, switching to methodone - sorry, iPhone - hasn't been without its side effects. Syntax, for exampled, has struggled, with coherence occasionally varying wildly.

E-mails to important people (you know, bosses, CEOs) have been hampered by words like "of" and "on" being autocorrected to "if"and "in" in the final article.

In fact this feature is so counter-productive I have terned it of and will now mayk do with my own spalling capeabillytees.

So while you congratulate my self-restraint, I have to confess that this last week I have been feeling terribly smug. Smug in a sort of German-standard-of-living smugness. Smug in a couple-posing-as-husband-and-wife-for-Sunday-colour-supplement-furniture-ad way. Smug in an "I invested well in my 20s and am now retiring in my early 50s to live in comfort and wear a lot of pastel" level of smuggery. I'll stop now with the smug references.

Because when people come to remember where they were during The Great BlackBerry Blackout I will simply recall enjoying the silence. No one was sending e-mails, so there were none to be read. Entire business meetings were conducted with near 100% attention. Train journeys became torturous events as newspapers returned to brief popularity. Conclusive, engaging conversations broke out in households. One person even walked across to my desk to ask me a question in person. In person!

People were left hurt, baffled and unable to cope (Colleague #1: "Where's the fax machine?". Colleague #2: "The what?". Colleague #1: "The fax machine!". Colleague #2: "What's that then?". Colleague #1: "Aaaaagggghhhhhh!"). Some threatened the return of Hotmail. Others took to begging in the street for just a fix, a sniff of e-mail. Just one - it didn't have to be an entire back-and-forth.

So, for a few days, people actually had to open their laptops to do some work. Engagement with others meant, for a short time at least, writing messages with thought, rather than stabbed out on a tiny QWERTY keyboard in the back of a taxi.

Ridiculous to think that BlackBerry's outtage (which, ironically, my iPhone's autocorrect thinks should be "outrage") should have been considered by many to be some sort of temporary return to Year Zero. As if being blamed for causing the UK riots wasn't bad enough, BlackBerry was now being held responsible for bringing the world of business communications to its knees during a time of worsening global financial mayhem.

Makes you wonder how on earth they coped during the great Typewriter Correction Fluid Shortage of 1981...

Unplugged at last

With the majority of summer tans now less deep mahogany as peeling like a Minnesota blizzard, What Would David Bowie Do? has finally down-tooled, thrown a selection of tastefully decorated Tommy Bahama shirts into a bag and jetted away for its first proper break of 2011.

In so doing, colleagues have been left behind still trying to get on top of the e-mail deluge that mounted, like pizza delivery leaflets behind the front door, during the Great August Exodus, when the office made the Marie Celeste look like Oxford Street on Christmas Eve.

As I sink the first of many cold ones to toast Brer Rest and Brer Relaxation, I'll be counting on the goodwill of others to ensure my week-long sojourn is uninterrupted by the expectations placed upon the modern worker bee. In particular, I hope the Out-of-Office notification is actually heeded, and I don't receive any of those "I know you're on holiday, but I just wanted to grab a couple of minutes of your time" phone calls that beggar belief at their downright ill-consideration.

The nerve of these calls notwithstanding, it is, sadly, a facet of modern working life that, thanks to the electronic age, time off is rarely that. More than a third of us now have a smartphone with ownership rising at a phenomenal rate. But in these uncertain and insecure times, taking time out to recharge the batteries is regarded by some as high risk, and by others - clearly on the extreme edge of rational thought - an act of professional perversion worthy of the white feather of conscientious objection.

As each summer in our 24/7-connected world comes along, more and more workers are taking to their holiday sun loungers with paperback, Factor 50 and a BlackBerry. Worse still are those who take their company laptops with them. I've even been on conference calls where the sound of crashing waves and partners complaining about sand in awkward places can be heard in the background.

Can we, today, realistically switch off completely while on holiday? Some manage just fine. Others struggle to make the transition between replacing the proverbial bowler hat and umbrella with the four-pointed handkerchief. Some find a system ("I'll check my e-mail once a day while the wife takes a shower and then I'm done"). Others don't, judging by the frequency throughout the working day with which I received e-mails in August from people who were meant to be amid their kith and kin on a beach.

There was a time when going on holiday meant queuing up to use a public pay phone if you had any reason to connect with home, office or both. Now we don't even send postcards - we have the tools at our disposal. It's our own fault.

Or is it. A study earlier this year by Virgin Atlantic found that a quarter of bosses thought it was acceptable to call an employee while they were on holiday. Worse, 14 per cent of employers have even telephoned minions to reprimand them during their holiday! Choosing exotic timezones for a holiday might thwart managers (though not all) ringing up in the middle of the night, but the study found that Europeans choosing a European destination for a holiday dramatically increased the chances of a boss calling on the grounds that they were 'only' in Europe.

If you're self-employed, an eminent heart surgeon or Prime Minister of a country suddenly overun by hooded youths torching shops and stealing sportswear, then the interrupted holiday comes with the territory. The poor old US President can't travel anywhere without a Navy officer standing behind him carrying 'The Football', the briefcase containing the codes to start nuclear war. For everyone else, nearly a quarter of adults don't think they're paid enough to warrant employers calling up during their holiday, even if possession of a company-supplied mobile phone gave greater justification for doing so.

Technology is to blame. It's not just the fact that digital umbilical cords like the BlackBerry make it easier to stay on top of work - for some it's just a force of habit. We Brits, apparently will check our mobile phone for e-mail messages up to 12 times a day while on holiday and, over the course of a two-week holiday, send as many as nine e-mails or text messages.

For Americans, who typically only get a couple of weeks off a year, giving up precious holiday time to deal with the office carries greater risks than just a ticking off from the significant other. Studies several years ago found that Americans who didn't take holidays stood a higher chance of developing heart disease, and the risk of a heart attack increased by a third. Spending your holiday at the bottom of a beer glass, of course, may not exactly reduce the chance of a major cardiovascular episode, but taking a week or two off is, most therapists agree, as beneficial as ensuring eight hours' uninterrupted sleep every night.

So, while it's impossible to completely drown out the cacophonous soundtrack created by the electronic noise of modern life, it may be better to get stressed out by not answering the phone when the boss dials up during your holiday, than accepting the call. After all, there's an off-switch on your phone for a reason.

Don't shoot the Messenger

At the end of a week in which Neanderthal instincts came to the fore in Tottenham, Clapham, Croydon and other parts of England, we are told that the human brain may have reached the limit of its development, and may even be genetically starting to shrink. 

Being the energy hog that it is (you'll have burned five calories just reading this post), scientists believe that our brains are finding ways to conserve energy, and shrinking - perhaps to the size of our early ancestors' brains - is a possibility. 

This follows another recent piece of neurological research which suggested that computers and the Internet are causing us to use our memories less, as we use the likes of Wikipedia and Google more as a form of 'offline' storage. With most of us now online and more people carrying smartphones around, information is instantly available - so why waste our own storage capacity when someone's cloud server can take the burden?

Blaming technological progress has always been too easy. Caxton's printing press opened up the spread of knowledge, but was also demonised in fundamentalist quarters. The Internet has faced a similar gauntlet. 

The World Wide Web - which, coincidentally celebrated its 20th birthday this week - has, along with most other forms of information and communications technology, revolutionised life and transformed everything from education, commerce and travel, to government, economic development and social interaction. The list of things we just did differently before Tim Berners-Lee came up with his interconnected network is endless.

But just because a group of hooded miscreants, who've bought into BlackBerry's marketing of BBM to non-business users, started lobbing wheelie bins through the windows of Currys and Foot Locker, we end up with politicians calling for smartphones, Facebook and Twitter to be curbed.

Weren't we, earlier this year, praising these very same tools for their role in transforming the political and social landscape in Egypt, Tunisia and other parts of the Middle East? Didn't Twitter provide a vital lifeline to the victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami?

No sooner had popular revolution in one part of the world become popular revolt in another, than the politicians were leaping on the technology involved in it. Don't shoot the messenger.

Whether the orchestrators of this week's mayhem used BBM, SMS or World War One carrier pigeons to marshall the looting, it wouldn't have made a difference. Those bent on theft and arson would have caused it anyway.

People who have been quick to apportion blame have been equally quick to forget that it was Facebook, Twitter and, we assume, BlackBerry and other smartphones, who galvanised the community response. When 200 people take part in a riot, and 500 come together via a social network to clean it up, I think it's safe to say who the winner is.