Email appropriately

For further thoughts on reducing email, see Doug Cornelius’ blog post Email Deluge about trying to free yourself from email on KM Space and the comments string. And for a more lighthearted take, read Lucy Kellaway in Monday’s FT, Shock of BPC: before personal computers.

I have just started a 24-hour low-tech vigil to mark the stepping down of Bill Gates, who more than any other human being has made the modern office what it is. I wanted to celebrate his departure from full-time work at Microsoft by reminding myself of what life was like when windows were things that let the light in.

Last Tuesday afternoon, I composed an automatic e-mail reply that said: “Lucy Kellaway is in the office, but not on the computer. You can send me a letter, or ring, or visit me on the second floor.” Then I pressed Submit, but got a message saying: “Error. Database has too many unique field names. Ask administrator to compact database.” God, I hate computers.

I love them, too. I have no truck with the idea that they have frazzled our minds and shrunk our souls: most office workers seem to be doing perfectly well, as far as I can judge. Although I am addicted to e-mail, it’s quite under control. Twenty-four hours’ cold turkey would be no problem.

Leeches?

Just as the police suffer from being typecast, so too do lawyers. I enjoy The Policeman’s Blog, but the most recent post Leeches, Vultures and Sturmey Archer, did nothing for my lawyerly self-esteem (you need to read the whole post: the original story was in the Daily Telegraph),

‘Village bobby’ (he’s actually a PCSO but for once that’s a mere detail) Nick Barker has spent the last who-knows-how-long pootling round the Kent countryside on a bike, doing all the usual village bobby things.
Now he’s been stopped, on health-and-safety grounds.
The problem is, he hasn’t passed Kent Police’s ‘two-day Basic Police Cycle Skills course’.
Until he can pass this course, he’s having to travel around the villages he looks after by bus and on foot.
A Kent spokeswoman said: “All officers must complete a bicycle training course before they can ride a bike on duty, it is about ensuring their safety and the safety of those around them. The purpose of the course is to ensure they have all the relevant skills and knowledge to make the best use of the bike within their roles.”
Dear God in Heaven, how have we come to this?
‘All the relevant skills and knowledge’ to ride a bike? That would be getting on, pedalling and getting off, then. Two day course, £200 a day for the trainer. It’s nice work if you can get it.
It’s not fair to blame Kent Police. All major publicly-funded organisations are led by unimaginative and cowardly timeservers who have forgotten what real life is like.
No, the blame lies on the shoulders of the lawyers, hovering overhead and waiting for Nick Barker to fall off his bike.
What next? Barker goes on the course – and still falls off. Sue the trainers? The bicycle manufacturers? The highways people? Who cares? Sue anyone, as long as you sue someone.
And who foots the bill for these leeches? You.

Water lilies

It has been a strange weekend, but some things don’t change.

We have spent the afternoon in the garden, mowing the lawn, weeding and potting on various plants. Tea time was the opportunity to sit , reflect on the day, and watch the pond: this year the water lilies cover nearly half of it, with plenty more flowers to come.

A tale of two generations

At a dinner last month, the host (Chairman of a Business Angels Network) and I realised that we were probably the oldest two in a room of 50. It is not that we are that old (mid-50s), but that in the work we do clients and colleagues are getting younger. Law 21, one of my law blog feeds, had a series of interesting posts some weeks ago on the issues both of employing Generation Y and having Generation Y as clients.

Law 21 is Canadian law blog, but the problems either side of the Atlantic are the same, and there is little difference in the way we approach the issues (or, as is often the case, don’t), and it is certainly not just technology but culture as well.

I thought of this again the day before yesterday. The day started at Twofour Communications in Plymouth, at an event both celebrating their 20 years in business and targeted at the South West professional community, to whom they would like to sell more services. What was most noticeable was that almost without exception the guests were a generation older than the hosts (which led me to ask whether they had in fact asked the right people). At the end of the day Caroline and I were at The Northcott Theatre in Exeter, for a concert by Tasmin Little and John Lenehan, as part of the Exeter Summer Festival. Here we were among the younger members of the audience. The contrast between my day’s start and finish could not have been clearer, or more illustrative of the the different worlds in which we now live and work.

Generational issues are much in my mind as a lawyer, and not just the prospect of employing Graduate Divas. Nicholas Carr’s closing to his latest book, The Big Switch, is relevant both to lawyers, and also to Twofour,

All technical change is generational change. The full power and consequence of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their parents to the margins. As the older generations die, they take with them their knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived, and only the sense of what was gained remains. It is in this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be.

Life was ever thus.

If it was just the dustbins. . .

Helienne Lindvall, writing in guardian.co.uk this morning, identifies the problem we face, when complaining about the steady encroachment of civil liberties: not just that the authorities take a very black and white view, along the lines, “If you are not in favour of it, you must be against it”, or worse, Gordon Brown’s argument “that new state powers were guarantors of liberty, not threats to it”, but that for many of our fellow citizens, why worry,

“Many people are of the opinion that if you’re not doing anything untoward or illegal you have nothing to worry about. This argument has also been used when it comes to the latest news of UK councils snooping on their constituents. But, knowing people who get interrogated every time they pass the US borders (some of them are even US citizens), because they work for perfectly legal organisations like Peta and Amnesty International, I think the expression “in the interest of national security” is open to a wide range of interpretations.”

Her subheading is that regular monitoring is nothing new to Swedish citizens, and

“In fact, I’ve probably been flagged up for writing this.”

You and me both!