Work email is a logistical -- and emotional -- minefield. If you don't respond with speed, clarity and directness to a given message, you'll be left behind and probably fired by the morning. But if you fail to als insert four exclamation marks at the end of every sentence, Jan from sales or Pete from analytics will think you're a big, moody meanie.
Well thanks to the ease of Gmail’s extensions system, one developer might just be ready to help.
‘Emotional Labor’ by researcher Joanne McNeil is a new extension which will take the text of your email and automatically find places to insert extra enthusiasm!!!! It will paste up to five lol exclamation marks, lovlies, at the end of sentences!!! And it will drip other lovely words into your copy, in what might look like a perfectly natural way if you're the sort of monster who didn't find the last two sentences utterly hateful.
In a post on Medium, via Wired.co.uk, McNeil admitted that the project is intended largely as satire rather than as a genuinely useful service.
“I was inspired to create the extension after many futile attempts to start using canned responses,” she said. “The Emotional Labor email extension looks fake. That’s the point. I wanted to reveal my exhaustion, my fatigue in needing to attend to so much correspondence.
“Until there is an emoticon for “Things are kind of not great but I don’t want to disturb you let’s just pretend things are fine,” that’s the grey area where this project resides. I made this to reveal the friction in my indecisiveness — how many xs do I normally sign off — one, two, three?”