Computer Illiteracy?

Today has been a hard day at work for me. Sure I’m at home, I’m in comfy clothes and can take a break whenever I really need it, but as work days go, this one sucks. Last night, we sent out a bulk mailing to all active subscribers, and all inactive accounts that had only gone inactive in the last 90 days. Apparently this amounted to about 45,000 messages. I didn’t know it was being sent out last night, though. I found out this morning when I start work to find my mailboxes jam packed with email. See, the problem is that the bulk email really only applies to a fraction of the people who got the message. Tons of people got the message when it has no bearing on them. We had no choice, though, due to our rapid growth and a restructuring of services that’s happening this month, we had to get more information from our users to proceed effectively.

Well, people don’t like getting email they don’t expect, doesn’t apply to them, or just plain confuses their tiny brains. As a result, I’m having to sift through a large number of “unsubscribe me!”, “what is this??”, “go to hell!”, “Validate yourself with my spam filter”, and other messages. What’s worse is that of those that this message actually applied to, there are plenty who either just can’t read, are too lazy to read the whole message, or just plain don’t understand what “click this link and fill in the form” means.

This isn’t tech support. It’s freaking data entry. This isn’t my job, but I have to slog through it so that I can breath the fresh air at the end of the tunnel. I’m punching through spam filters, blocking people from further e-mail, and filling out form for the lazy and stupid ones.

To top it all off, I know that these are just the replies from the people who have actually checked their e-mail in the last 12 hours. More of all these messages will continue to pour in, then trickle in over the next week or so. It’s not enough I’m having to walk Granny Smith through how to open up her Geek Squad installed firewall application for our software to work, now I’ve got to do the crap work these lazy people can’t bring their pea brains to comprehend.

Some people really shouldn’t be using computers.