Email Boss Fight

Like those Law & Order episodes, this blog post is based on real events. Names have been changed to protect the innocent...or was it the guilty?  Anyway. Everyone is assumed innocent until proven guilty. Wait, wrong kind of story.


Anyway. Story time.

A large group of friends got together for dinner at a sushi place in town.  There were a good 10-12 of us in attendance. Everyone except for me and two other "geek wives" worked for a video game company in some capacity. Ironically, two of us "geek wives" work in higher education. Small world!

Of course, being of technical minds, many phones were out throughout the night. Our friend was showing my husband a picture of a house project he was working on. Breaky noticed that our friend had over 45,000 unread emails. No joke.




(not actual picture obviously)

Of course discussions about preferences ensued, with everyone believing they were right. For example, I HATE unread or "new" notifications of any kind on my phone, computer or tablet. I will wade through hundreds of emails to clear everything out to get rid of that pesky little orange or red number. Others, it doesn't matter.

Our friend mentioned how, when he tries to select all unread messages to change it to read or delete that gmail freezes and crashes the browser.

Lots of back and forth occurred, including creating formulas to select, group, delete, read etc... and all these creative solutions that were absolutely plausible.** End result was our friend not being super interested in making that kind of effort to fix it. This of course resulted in a small uproar from us "read email" purists.

Then, someone told our friend that he, who is a video game enthusiast, should treat this as a video game. Work on it to get the number lower.

Here is a small snippet of how that conversation, which ended up including the whole table, devolved:

"Dude,  you're a gamer, treat it as a game!"
"Wouldn't that meant I want that number to be higher? I should go for the high score!"
"No, no, a lower number! Like golf. Golf is a game!"
"Or like a boss fight!"
"Yeah, the health of the boss needs to go down"
"But how do you get XP though? If he really wanted to, he would go for the high score and get it to 100,000 unread emails. "
"Hey, don't encourage him!"


Yes. Someone's unread email got compared to golf, a boss fight, and XP.

I have to say, if anything our dinners are rarely boring.

** For those encountering the same problem with email, here's the link I have above regarding clearing out those unread emails: http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-mark-all-unread-emails-as-read-in-gmail-and-more/