The intent of email is to facilitate communication. Right?

So – someone mails me to ask to meet Tuesday. I send a reply:

I can’t meet  Face to Face that day, so let’s do it by phone – can you do it at 3 PM?

The reply I get says:

If it’s FTF I can’t, can we do it on the phone?

This happens all the time: you explicitly write something – and your correspondent acts as if it weren’t there. Can’t they read?!

Truth is, they can read all right, but they have so many emails, so little time, and so many distractions that they only scan the message ever so quickly and react to the first thing that registers. Which results in incomplete communication, which requires more mails to resolve the mess, which increases the load… a classic runaway positive feedback loop!