You Have 3 Important Emails
Weekend Dispatch #6
Brad is a vendor. His job is to sell things to people who are not me. I am not sure Brad has fully internalized this. He showed up at my desk at 2pm on Tuesday. Not to sell me something. To show me something. There is a difference, apparently. I have not yet figured out which one is worse. He had his phone. He was smiling.
He has been given a Copilot license and he wanted me to know about it.
“I set up a scheduled prompt,” he said, pulling up his screen like he was about to show me a sonogram. “Every hour, it reads my inbox and sends me a summary of the important emails. So I never miss anything.”
I looked at the screen.
It was 2pm. His inbox had 10 emails. Three of them were from this morning. The other five were from Copilot. Hourly summaries. Each one telling him, in three bullet points, that he had received emails this morning and that they might require his attention. One of the summaries had a follow-up recommendation: consider replying to confirm receipt.
There was also one email from his mother. Copilot had flagged it as low priority.
I did the math quietly. Five AI-generated emails to track three human ones. A net negative of two. And the day wasn’t over.
Brad was still smiling. “The key,” he said, “is that I don’t have to check my inbox anymore. It comes to me.”
I nodded. I looked at the inbox. I looked at Brad. I looked at the inbox again.
“It sent you an email,” I said, “to tell you that you have emails.”
“Exactly,” said Brad.
There was a pause. Brad took it as appreciation. I took it as a moment of discomfort.
He explained to me that he had set up his scheduled prompt alone, to run every hour, on the hour. He was obviously proud of the setup. He used the word automated four times and intelligent twice. He did not use the word irony.
At some point he asked me what I thought. I told him I’d have to catch up later. I was going to wait for the summary. He laughed. He thought I was joking. I was not joking.
Brad put his phone back in his pocket and lectured me that this kind of setup “changes how you relate to information,” and left to show Derek.
Twenty minutes later, Derek stopped by my desk. He was smiling. He had questions about scheduled prompts.
I told him I’d send him the details later.
By email.
Norm works in IT. He has opinions. They are allegedly his own.