Another E-mail Post

I suggest starting from the initial email below and then reading my rejoinder. I'm pretty sure I used 6 too many commas in the 4th paragraph.

On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 12:51 PM, Bryan *******  wrote:

Good Afternoon Brian,

I hope you had a good weekend.

Do you have a few minutes this week to speak about last basketball season?  I was hoping to learn about your experience and get some feedback. Please let me know if there is a good time and day to reach you.

I've also attached more information on your season ticket benefits for this season.

Thank you again for your support and I look forward to speaking with you.

Bryan

---------- Reply message ----------
From: Brian
Date: Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 6:09 PM
Subject: Re: A few minutes to speak?
To: Bryan *******

Hello Bryan,

I had an excellent weekend. Thank you for asking. I hope you had a good weekend as well.

I do have a few minutes to speak about last basketball season, but I suspect that I am not the Brian you are intending to speak to. Unfortunately, I have never attended a Carleton Ravens game, although from what I understand, they had a terrific season capped of with another national championship. Congratulations!

Carleton has been kind enough to send me email updates on the team since the fall of 2012. Despite several attempts to unsubscribe from your e-blasts I remained solidly in-the-know regarding the happenings of the Carleton Ravens. Unfortunately I was not able to attend the Women's Basketball Shoot for the Cure this past February, as I live in California.

Don't get me wrong Bryan, I would love to attend more Carleton games but I simply don't make it to Ottawa enough to take in the action. Although I am a fan of Canadian basketball, especially since the great province of Ontario has produced one of my favorite players, the venerable Nik Stauskas, who happens to play for my Alma Mater, The University of Michigan.

You can reach out to me any time. Stay in touch.

- Brian

P.S. I enjoyed the recent write up on the Men's Basketball Program on Grantland.Com.

Stumble

It was a bright summer day in 2008 and instead of enjoying it my roommates and I were all sitting around the house watching trash TV. It was one of those days where it was too hot to really pay attention to the episode of Intervention or Tyra. Most of us were on our laptops fucking around on the internet. A constant stream of giggles were coming for the couch where Peter sat. Every few minutes he would turn the monitor around and show us something ridiculously funny. Soon after we were all huddled around his computer watching him press the "random button" on the internet.

That button was StumbleUpon. An internet engine that with a click of a button would take you to a site that you would probably like based on your preferences. It's how I first discovered XKCD. I spent probably an hour a day for the next 2 years stumbling. Staying awake for "one last stumble before bed". Eventually I had to quit, it was just too much. I destroyed my laptop bought a new computer and refused to download StumbleUpon. Sure enough Stumble wondered where one of it's most faithful servants had gone and sent me a message.



I had no choice but to respond and break it off.

I was just going through some old emails and came across my response and got a good chuckle. I never heard back from Stumble but re-reading it made me think fondly about all the things I could have accomplished if it wasn't for StumbleUpon.

E-Mail Analysis

My cousin turned me onto this nifty widget Google Chrome has that will analyze you're Gmail inbox and give you a pretty cool graph. It is located here. I have been using Gmail as my primary email for over 6 years now. That's a large number of emails that I've sent and received. It comes out to almost 25,000 archived emails. I once read a great blog post by my good friend Brian where he ran an analysis of his Inbox. It was pretty interesting and I wanted to do something similar. I tried for like five minutes trying to figure out how to download all my email data as CSV, and then gave up and drank a Keystone Ice. I found that while the Ice was harder to come by, the black label looked really cool.

Blue are all emails, Red are sent emails

I had assumed the top chart would look something like this. It's like you can tell which months classes started and finished each year. The second chart gives some information that I always wondered about. How much of my email traffic comes through early in the week. Well if November of 2008 is any indication, Mondays and Tuesday accounted for like 50% of the email traffic in a given week. You can also see that like most people I receive emails at a much larger rate than I send them by about a 1:10 ratio. But that's pretty common.

So where did all those emails come from? Let's go to the chart.

Wow. Of the 25,000 emails I have archived about 1 in 8 are facebook (blue) related. That is a little scary. The other ones are from the U of M class web-based site Ctools (red), online risk (orange) and emails from bus drivers (green). Combined these account for like a third of all the emails I've ever received. It looks like I played a lot of online risk in July of 2008. The really cool graph is the bottom right. I've stopped getting emails from my classes which makes sense. My online risk playing must have gone downhill. I am definitely less social judging by my reduced use of Facebook to near Sophomore year levels. Finally, my job doesn't spam my personal email address so often. It looks like I much be more boring now. Maybe that is the cause of the reduced blogging.

Perhaps I'll do some more graphing of my emails to try and determine exactly when I started overusing the term "buttmuncher" in my emails.

E-Mail Legend

How do I know I am a Campus Legend at Michigan? Because 8 months after I graduate they are still detailing my exploits in the Michigan Daily. Last April I detailed the horrific disaster of group emailing. The post, including what I had emailed is here.

I send out this email as a joke, write the blog post and go on my merry way. Fast forward 8 months. The daily writes a story where they quote (actually misquote) the email I wrote.

It wasn’t, of course, the end. Later on, the 65th response took frustration to a new level.

“I swear that if any one else replies to all I will hunt you down on the umich directory and disable every electronic device that they own.,” it read. “I will convert your keyboard layout to Swahili. / The person who sent out the original e-mail spammed a group that she does not control. SHE CANT TAKE YOU OFF THE MAILING LIST. You have to e-mail the owner to be removed. DON’T EMAIL THE ENTIRE GROUP TO BE REMOVED. Seriously learn some email etiquette.”

That's how I know. 8 months after I graduate The Daily publishes emails I wrote.

Work Emails 1

I work with mosty engineers that are about my age. It's amazing to see how quickly emails can go from innocent, professional emails to any direction we decide to take them. Best to start from the bottom.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan
Sent: Friday, February 12, 2010 2:29 PM
To: Sara; Brian
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

I like the direction that conversation went. Well done.

-----Original Message-----
From: Sara
To: Jonathan; Brian
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

OMG!!!!!!!!

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan
To: Brian; Sara
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

I have nipples Brussels, can you milk me?

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian
To: Sara; Jonathan
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

You can milk anything with nipples.

-----Original Message-----
From: Sara
To: Brian; Jonathan
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

Like for breast milk, with a pump...it's weird

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian
To: Sara; Jonathan
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

Describe this "boob pumping"

-----Original Message-----
From: Sara
To: Jonathan; Brian
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

I wasn't sure if you meant like to do construction to put a door on the outside or something. I've never seen anyone use the couch...oh wait yes I have. The one girl used to pump her boob in there...HAHAHAHA so funny

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan
To: Sara; Brian
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

I was 100% joking about an office. I think that would violate like 10 codes. And, you'd want headphones in like all the time.

-----Original Message-----
From: Sara
To: Jonathan; Brian
Subject: RE: ESB 1st floor square footage

There is a couch in there, but I don't think it would be big enough for an office. It would be crazy small, almost like a closet.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan
To: Brian; Sara
Subject: ESB 1st floor square footage

B-Russ,

Attached is the square footage of all the rooms (excluding non-office areas) on the 1st floor of ESB. I got this information from the AutoCAD file (not the incorrect Visio file layout. I just used Visio because I could enter in the values). The square footage values are in (RED).

I will work on the 2nd floor next.

Sara,

See the "possible office" attachment. Regarding the gray area- what is this mysterious room in the girl's restroom? Are there couches?

More importantly, could we turn it into an office?

That is all, for now.

VICTORY!

Hi Brian

Maintenance confirmed that when they repaired the side door it was operable and could be opened at the time.

FYI, maintenance provided us with another picture which was taken back in September 2008 before the door was repaired. However, as a gesture of good will, we will credit your account for the legal fees and repairs to the broken door in order to foster good relations and in the hopes that the house will be treated more kindly in the future.

Thank you.

Yours Truly,

Michelle

Note how they never admitted that they were wrong. Like they were doing us a favor by not charging us their legal fees. Either way I'm very pleased that I won. But it wasn't without the help of my free lawyer Gayle "The Hailstorm" Lawyerlady who referred to my emails as "brillant". This calls for a celebration tune.

Brian gets spammed hardcore

So this dumb bitch decides that she wants people to take her psych survey (whose link doesn't work) so she decides to spam her dorm hall and the entire psych group that totals about 500 people. So someone emails back that it doesn't work, then a few more people also email that the project was due a week ago. Then one idiot decided that they didn't want to be part of the group so they email the entire group to be removed. This starts a firestorm or emails.

4:25 - First email sent

6:04 - First "Don't reply to all" email

6:09 - First "Please take me off the list" email

6:41 - First new subject (thread) to get sent out about being taken off the list.

6:42 - Original emailer sends out an apology and begs everyone to stop ending emails. Her pleads are unheard over the sounds of people clicking "reply to all".

6:43 - I send out my first email to everyone:

I swear that if any one else replies to all I will hunt you down on the umich directory and disable every electronic device that you own. I will then convert your keyboard layout to Swahili.

The person who sent out the original email spammed a group that she does not control. SHE CANT TAKE YOU OFF THE MAILING LIST. You have to email the owner Bwallace@umich.edu to be removed. DON'T EMAIL THE ENTIRE GROUP TO BE REMOVED.

Seriously learn some email etiquette.

6:55 - I start individually emailing people who "Reply to All" with this message:

Can you read? You replied to all. You don't deserve to use a computer. What do you have to say for yourself? You better start learning Swahili.

7:13 - Someone sends out an email with the subject "The spam solution!!! Read Brian Russell's email!!!!!!!!!!!" With my email attached.

7:31 - 100th email about this.

The 100 emails came in over 20 threads with the biggest at 51 emails. About half of the emails were "take me off the list" and the other half was "Don't reply to all!". 63 of the Email's were sent between 6:40 and 7pm.

I think the owner or ITCS finally got smart and shut the group down because it's no longer coming up on the directory which is a relieving end to this Wednesday night saga. No one responded to my demands that they explain their rash emailing actions. I think that means they realized that they are idiots.

Brian Writes an E-mail

A couple of weeks ago I got an email urging student to pass on things about North Campus that bother them. They had some sort of feedback committee that would review them or something. Well, there are many things that annoy me about North Campus so I decided to email him back with one of my complaints.

Subject: Climbing stairs really ticks my clock!

Hi,

You know what really gets my goat about north campus? When you walk between the Laurie building and the north campus diag you have to walk down a flight of stairs and then almost immediately up another flight of stairs, talk about busting my butt! And what really frosts my balls about the whole situation is that it looks like such a straight shot over to the walkway on the other side. There should be a bridge, fallen timber or zipline so that I don't have to walk down the stairs and then right back up.

It's just something that really grinds my gears. I've attached a picture to illustrate how much this chaps my ass.

Brian


He then actually responded that they would discuss it at their next meeting. I'm not holding out much hope for any improvement though.

3 Worst Uniqnames

ANAL@umich.edu - Ana Licerda
Don't need to explain why having your uniquename be anal could be taken the wrong way.

BROHEAT@umich.edu - Heather Bromand
I work with her and every time she sends an email I think it's from the furnace at ADPhi.

BJAMESS@umich.edu - Brendon J Schwartz
Its clear B-James-S. It's his first initial followed by his middle name, and the first initial of his last name. But not when you read it BJ-A-Mess. Every time this shows up in my inbox I crack up about the messy BJ.