It will never be buried

Why a book at all? This guide to email etiquette, written by a pair of New York Times hacks, ought to exist as a viral attachment bouncing around the world from computer to computer. It kicks off with Jo Moore’s notorious and oft-misquoted email. Here’s the exact wording: ‘It is now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors’ expenses?’ It’s the details that make this sorry little haiku so grisly. The verb ‘bury’ is spectacularly tasteless and the macabre contrast between the epoch-shifting events unfolding in New York and the parochial timbre of councillors’ expenses gives it a final gruesome seal of insensitivity. The timing, 14.55, indicates that Ms Moore sent her message shortly after the second tower had been hit. Perhaps with one tower in flames it was only a fair-to-moderate day for bad news. And then things got a whole lot better.

The illusion that undid her is that emails are transient, like bubbles, when in fact they have the permanence of lapidary inscriptions. Once sent, an email is forever. This book is full of advice about how to use the medium courteously and safely. In America, a multi-million-dollar drug lawsuit hinged on the implications of an email sent by an executive. ‘Do I have to look forward to spending my waning years writing checks to fat people worried about a lung problem?’ It was taken as an admission of guilt. Once an investigation begins, employees are served with a ‘freeze letter’ forbidding them from deleting emails. Then the Feds move in with complex new spyware that scours a firm’s collected inboxes for suspicious phrases: ‘can’t sleep’, ‘high blood-pressure’, ‘I have serious concerns’, ‘can we get away with it?’ ‘DELETE THIS EMAIL!!!’ and, my favourite, ‘they’ll never find out.’ I bet Yates of the Yard has read that a few times.