I Hate Emails

Once again, I’ve been pacing the place, repeating to myself that I need to get my shit together, drinking too much again.; need to replace it with something.  So, I need to write stuff again.  After two days of calling off work because I just can’t get out of bed, I’m going in to the office tomorrow.  There will be a lot of emails…

I want to just jot down my recent hatred of emails, get used to organizing thoughts again, and see that if by doing so, I might be able to glean something from them. 

Since about April of last year, I have been steadily hating emails.  My job is basically all through email and I hate it.  I walk in every morning to anywhere from 50 (a good day) to 150 unread emails that I have to sift through and organize.  And then they just keep coming in all day after that.  Each alert like a dripping of a sink that keeps you awake.  I know they aren’t sent with malice, but my temper flares each time a new email comes in.  

My inbox always has at least 1,000 emails just sitting in there that I have no time to go through and simply delete.  So, I always have a ton of mental baggage in the back of my head that depresses me when I remember it.  Tomorrow, I expect to have more than 300 emails to go through and I’m not happy about it.

I just got back from taking a walk and, knowing that I have to work tomorrow, images of the Windows Outlook interface flashed into my mind with all it’s unorganized, unending chaos of requests and instructions in a mixture of blue highlighting, white walls and red flags; this, in addition to the myriad of folders to the left, burgeoning with tasks in a queue that I have no idea when I’ll have time for.  Remembering this hurts my mood like a shock of pain from a decaying tooth, reminding me of a problem I don’t wish to address.

My own personal email is annoying as well.  When I hear people say they go through their personal email and delete them, I can’t understand spending my time doing it.  On my phone, I have 27,594 unread emails.  It’s my little digital garage full of shit that I don’t want to clean out.  It’s all garbage. 

I’m sure there’s a lot to be said about the whole “technology is meant to help us but stresses us out” idea, but I’m not going to talk about that here.  Not because I don’t believe it, but because it’s been said by many others already and any reader can extrapolate that from what they’re reading here. 

Now, how can I address this problem?  Colleagues at work tell me I need to just go through and delete things that I don’t need.  Well yeah, I know that.  My issue with my job is that (and I say this to them often) “I literally do not have time to even delete emails.”  My workload really sucks.  They tell me I can work through my lunch and just get caught up with emails, but I want to get the hell out of there for an hour and not keep working.  They tell me I can work a few hours after work here and there to catch up and my overtime for that would be approved.  Ok, that might help a little, but then I feel like I can just work forever to catch up too!  After a full day of a job I hate and a long commute, I do not want to look at the Outlook screen at all.

I guess to come full circle, this is what I need to sort out: I hate my job.  I need a new one.  I drink because I’m depressed and one reason that I’m depressed is that I have my job.  When I got this position, I knew it would suck.  But I got a massive raise and I do have good insurance.  I quit going to school during COVID, so it made sense to just follow the path of this job.  After a month or so of me realizing it sucks, it gave myself two years to save a lot of money and try to come up with a plan.  I’ve been saving but I have not plan…

Well, feels good to have written something for this, even though it’s nothing that special.  Wish me luck, maybe tomorrow I can delete 1,000 emails and feel lighter and happier.  This is probably a bit clunky because I haven’t written anything in a long time.  Not saying I was amazing at it before, but I was getting better.  Anyway, Daphne Chicago will live on inshallah.