Hi all,

Over the past few months, it has come to our attention that certain members of staff are using a new email priority system - a system which involves adding the text RED, AMBER or GREEN into the subject of the message, based on its importance.

To save you all any further embarrassment, I would like to point out that Microsoft Outlook has a built in feature to do this. Next time you're sending an email, have a quick look at your toolbar. You'll see an exclamation mark that can be used to set the importance to high and a downward pointing arrow that can be used to set the priority to low. Normal priority is the default setting. If you're struggling to find or use this feature, shoot yourself.

Either way, these systems are fundamentally flawed and pointless due to different perspectives on importance; what's urgent for one person might be near-insignificant for another. If you're sending an email to person X and it's important to them, you'll identify the email as high importance (or, the idiots among you will type RED into the subject box); but you might be CC-ing three or four people to whom it isn't important. What then?

The other reason these systems fail is that the main driver in email prioritisation is who the email is from - anyone who claims otherwise is a liar.

What next? A special ring for phone calls of high importance? Maybe we could make the little screen flash red, green or amber depending on the importance of the call? As for face-to-face conversations, we could start them off with the appropriate colour;
Person One: "GREEN! How are you today?"
Person Two: "RED! I've got a knife and if you start a sentence with a colour again, I'm going to f*cking kill you, you enormous knob wart!"

In short, there's a better system already available and neither of them work. So please, stop being such try-hards, just read your emails and answer them.

Thanks,