Roughly 22 million missing e-mail messages from the Bush administration’s tenure in the White House over a period of 94 days were recently recovered. Gawker Editor Adrian Chen did the math, which translates to an estimated 1,000 messages per staffer, per day.

Insane? For anyone who gets their news online this will probably seem quite insane at first glance. But upon further reflection, 1,000 messages by a group of barely computer literate people is more than achievable.

It comes down to one very simple principle: E-mail is their primary form of communication. It’s their preferred form of communication and it replaces all other useful methods that others might use to better suit a situation.

No Instant Messaging

Instead of Instant Messaging, they use e-mail. A 15-minute conversation can multiply into 30 to 40 back and forth e-mails that aren’t grouped very well in Outlook and duplicate the text from the previous message every single time.

No Twitter or Yammer Use

The Bush administration, or hell, any Government we’ve ever had (including the current one) has yet to truly experience the micro-messaging tools like Twitter and Yammer. So E-mail has to be used in this way too. How many times on a busy day do you update your Twitter feed? Well each of those would be an additional email.

That Damn ‘Reply To All’ Button

Then there’s the notorious “Reply to All” button. I have no sympathy for the sons of bitches who chose to use this method of mass e-mail anarchy to inform all parties involved of every portion of the disjointed conversation. It seems to happen quite a bit in the office world and even outside of that to be completely honest. People aren’t too keen on chat rooms and so they don’t allow this to become a possibility when they need to communicate an entire message to a whole group of people.

Unfortunately, our government has the burden of having to keep all communication both archived and secure at all times. Right now the only form of communication that any government or business will even consider using to do this is E-mail. If 22-million messages can get lost, something isn’t working. We need a better communication tool that caters to both security and record-keeping and we don’t have one. More than that, we have plenty of people who don’t want to budge from their preferred form of communication, even if it bombards them with over 1.000 per day.

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Comments ( 3 )

Dude. I want to work on the White House Help Desk. That would be a trip.

———————————–
Date: 10/12/2007

“Yes, Mr. President?”

“I have this Internet Securtee thang on my screen sayin’ I have 125 infections”

“Mr. President, have you been downloading porn again?”

“I’m sorry, I just can’t get me enough of those Dixie Chicks photoshops”

“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-”

Greg Davies aka cGt2099 added these pithy words on Dec 15 09 at 1:46 pm

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