Conference 7.286::digital

    
    
    The ultimate irony is the source and content of the message.  I
    don't understand why the sender didn't qualify their audience a bit
    more, given the rather selective nature of the material.
    
    
    On Tuesday, December 4th, there will be a DECteams '90 Conference where 
    20 teams will present the results of their efforts to an audience of 
    middle managers.  

    and we encourage middle managers who are interested in learning how 
    teams are helping to turn Digital around to reserve a seat TODAY!  

    
------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Steve, I agree, this should not have gone to everyone in the facility, 
but our building all got it as well......Someone didn't read the couple of 
lines that I included above.....

    Too bad....

    	Vic H

    Yep, I got this one too, but I'm kinda divided about the comments on it
    here so far.  Yea, on one hand, it seems to be [perhaps] overly
    lengthy, and was perhaps addressed to the entire Digital world, which
    clearly uses lots of resources to do.
    
    But here's where I'm "divided" on this one: how many times have we all
    seen in this conference alone, not to mention other conferences,
    complaints to the effect of "geez, why didn't the top brass notify
    everybody about xxxxx, because I would have attended/participated if
    only I had known about it, why can't 'they' communicate these
    things"...
    
    Jon_trying_to_straddle_the_fence

Why didn't I get it?  I'm just down the hall from Steve.

What bothers me about this memo (which I received TWICE for some reason)
is that it talks about a meeting of a collection of committees to
talk about what we should do to streamline the system!

A few too many levels of indirection to be really effective, I would say.

And I'm really depressed about how many trees we're going to kill because of
the people who habitually print all their Email.

-steve-

... I bummed out at first; I thought that I had been "promoted" to a
middle manager :^)

/harley

    Now you can expect to see a flood of mail from computer near-illiterates 
    replying to the original memo, who don't realize there's a difference 
    between "A" (All) and "S" (Sender only), sending a request to the entire 
    mailing list, asking whoever "owns" it to take them off, because they 
    don't like to wade through junk mail.  Me neither.  
    
    I actually received an angry call once from a SALES REP (keyboard minus 
    shift key, no doubt) who took issue with my return mail (pointing out 
    the above logical conundrum) to her "take-me-off-your-mailing-list" 
    memo, which she mailed to the entire mailing list.  
    
    She said she'd sent it that way because she was "too busy" to find the 
    originator of the "junk" mail in question, and got irate when I pointed 
    out that the person who sends you the mail is in the 'sender' address, 
    and that I noticed that, though she was "busy", she found the time to 
    look up my phone number to rail at me long distance.
    
    karl

In ZKO, MTS mail gets redirected to our VAX MAIL accounts by Facilities.
But in other sites, it is often the case that if the MTS user has not
explicitly set up forwarding, the message is printed out automatically for
delivery.  THIS is what is going to kill a lot of trees!

(Gerald, perhaps you got missed by Facilities?  I discarded the original
so I couldn't look to see if you were on it.)

I could also argue about the MRGATE software that automatically appends
the distribution list when it forwards to VAX MAIL, but that's another
topic entirely.

My gripe is that this message is clearly addressed to a limited audience
("middle managers"), and was not appropriate for a mass mailing throughout
the Massachusetts-New Hampshire area. (I don't know how far it actually
went.)  I suppose I could also grumble about the event itself for the same
reasons as Steve Klein mentions.

Of course, this isn't the first fiasco of this nature.  An earlier note tells
of some course announcement that was not only mailed out to 10,000+
employees but for some reason got into a loop so that many of us received
it a dozen or more times, filling up disks left and right.

But ultimately, the whole thing is dismaying, in that it's apparent that
the result of trying to improve the efficiency of the company instead what
we're doing is forming more committees.

			Steve

    Yep, the memo made it out to the midwest. I read it through the first
    time, and thought `Whaaa..?' After reading through the second time, I
    deciced that it was content free and deleted it. As I remember, it did
    not come from my line manager, but somewhere else in IS.
    
    It does bring to mind one of the functions of management. It is that of
    postmaster/postmistress (/postmatron?). Granted that in a sales-type
    position, one must know absolutely everything about absolutely
    everything. But otherwise, a manager could add value by filtering mail
    going to the ICs. But then, they might be accused of restricting free
    flow of information. How do you win?

re: .8 "It is that of postmaster/postmistress (/postmatron?)"

	The terms I tend to use are Mailman and Mailma'am.