I am 57 years old. Among other things, that means that I have been scratching out letters, proposals, contracts, memoranda, and other related business “missiles” for about 36 years. Notice I did not say, “emails.” I didn’t say “emails” because I have come to the conclusion that emails are truly a product of the devil’s own mind.

For two and a half decades, I ran eight companies and NONE of them had even the slightest email capability. And guess what? People did their jobs. Sales were made and product was built and installed. Customers paid their bills, too.

And I never once left my office at night feeling the “heavy guilt” of having unread emails in my inbox.

Just recently, I sent what I considered to be an extremely innocuous email to the owner of a company whose board I serve on. What he (thought he) read and what I (thought I) had written were as far apart as Hip-Hop and Country Western. To get into specific content would serve no purpose (and possibly “finger” this owner and friend). However, suffice to say, that my three paragraph email sent this man into apoplexy.

The plain and simple fact of the matter is that, “language is imprecise.” It is colored by both the sender’s and the recipient’s present state of mind. It is also colored by one’s age, education level, and gender. This is all true. You can look it up.

I believe it was Thomas Wolfe who said, “We are all the sum of all of the moments of our lives.” I personally take this as the Wolfe-man’s way of saying, “no two snowflakes are alike.” Hence, my interpretation of a simple phrase like “we are at a crossroad” meant “strategic crossroad”, while the reader of my email took it as “life or death crossroad”.

Lawyers never use email. In fact, and even though we all perceive lawyers as the, “world’s greatest spewers of verbiage” the true fact of the matter is that almost zero opinions and even less hard facts are spawned via the word processors of both “legalman” and “legalwoman”.

Why? Because they know better. They know that every single word affixed to paper can and oftentimes will be interpreted slightly differently, thus requiring endless debate over that word’s intended meaning. (This is also, and indirectly, why so many lawyers drive Beemers.)

Por ejemplo . Back in 1787, a wonderful document was written by the founders of this great country. They called it “The Constitution.” That document was a perfect and succinct work of art that today would require 10 billion words (and about that many years) to replicate. The Constitution’s unambiguous brevity has rarely been exceeded, yet an entire industry of barristers has since evolved, interpreting and re-interpreting what this most perfect document truly says. How can that be?

Because it’s all about the imprecision of words . . . it’s no wonder great programmers refuse to document their work.

(By the way, a similar case could be made for the Bible and the subsequent hoard of Bible-interpreters known as, “Men of the Cloth.” The main difference is that these guys just don’t charge as much. Well, yet.)

About a decade ago, I worked with a man who perhaps is the brightest and most clever businessman I have ever known. He left corporate America to start his own company (which itself later merged with my company) at a rather advanced age (39, I believe) for a “corporate type”. I had worked with this guy for just about a year before I realized that he almost never sent an email or a memorandum, and in those rare cases where he did, it was, at most, just one or two sentences.

One day I asked him, “Mike, why don’t you ever respond to my emails?” His response? “When I get one worth responding to, I’ll certainly come and see you.”

Touché.

Right now, my email box says that it is storing some 12,300 unread emails. I’m now curious to see just how high it can go.

And you know what? I seem to be getting along just fine.