FROM THE BOSSMAN

BY ALLAN SKO [ALLAN@BMAMAG.COM]

Hello group, my name is Allan [Group: ‘Hello Allan’]. I’m here today because I have an emailing problem [Group: Pattered applause]. Here is my story...

People like cumulative stats. They can dazzle us, entertain us or, more often than not, make us feel bad about something.

The ‘amount of time we spend in queues in a lifetime’ is often wheeled out: “Did you know,” a voice sounding oddly like Stephen Fry will echo in your head, “that if you live to be 80 years old, then you would have spent at least 74 of those years waiting in a queue? Isn’t that amazing?”

In this regard, I shudder to recall how many years of my life have been flitted away on typing out the same lines via email. ‘Thanks for your efforts’, ‘Kind regards’, ‘I hope this finds you well’...

Out grind the same greetings and platitudes email after email, week after week, to the point that your fingers curl like RSI question marks so that when you look at your gnarled hands, they seem to plead back to you, ‘Why?’

Despite taking up 52% of our waking lives, these tedious yet crucial platitudes form the cornerstone of communication etiquette. As they should; after all, that’s what separates us from the animals. You don’t see an ape hurling its own faeces at a fellow primate and saying ‘Kind regards’ afterwards.

So what’s the solution? We seem somewhat trapped. If we do away with these tedious yet highly necessary forms of social lubrication, before you know it we’ll descend to a spirited game of poo chucking.

A gentle greeting and salutation keeps the trembling fabric of civilisation intact. No matter how mechanical, it demonstrates a desire—nay, a need—to spend the few precious seconds to construct such a genial salutation. Otherwise, it looks like this:

‘Allan, Do that thing. Now. Clive’

And here’s the problem. I simply can’t do that. Even with someone I’m very familiar with. Hell, especially someone I’m very familiar with.

After years of fruity missives, I become panicked that such a concise communique will appear abrupt. A sudden, ‘Yes, that’s fine’ could derail a friendship. ‘That’s very unlike Allan,’ they would ponder. ‘I wonder what’s the matter? Must be troubles in the bedroom.’

Locked into this eternal and infernal polite-off, I am faced with no other choice than to entertain myself as much as the recipient. Before I know it, I’ve locked myself into a nightmarish miasma of saucy adverbs and tosspot gaiety that lengthens along with the day. In the morning, I’ll warm up with a rudimentary, ‘Hello, and how are you today?’. By lunchtime it’s hit the slightly loose, ‘Hullo old bean, I hope the sun is shining gayly on your working week’; by the afternoon it’s transformed into, ‘A merry tra-la-la to you, you jackalent knave, I trust this missive finds you fleet of foot and wide of pupil’.

And by day’s end it’s descended into the positively brazen, ‘Well a hey nonny-nonny and a jolly fat blast of a hello raspberry right into your hardworking gills, you finger-snapping pimp-daddy jazz cat you, I do hope the sun’s celestial arc has beamed a frisson of delight onto your knitted working brow.’

Ridiculous.

So with your help, group, I’m hoping to break this communication nightmare, you magnificent bastions of shimmering... Ok, I know, I know. One step at a time...

ALLAN ‘KIND REGARDS’ SKO

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