Corporate One-Upsmanship

Here in my office (and I use the term loosely to describe the institution) there is a game we play. Who can get out the last e-mail of the day, or the last phone message. Here's how it goes. Just before you leave, say at 4:45, you fire off an e-mail that requires action on the part of the receiver. The next morning, you check to see if the person read the message yet. If not, then they left earlier than you did and you can continue the game by either: sending another e-mail, or calling the person. If they aren't yet in, then you can have even more pleasure by letting them know that you A) work later and B) come in earlier.

It doesn't matter if the job that needs to be done has been sitting on your desk for a week or two. What matters is that you got in the last e-mail of the day.

The spoiler to this game is when the person not only receives the message, but does the work, and sends you an e-mail back with a time stamp of something hellish like 7 pm.

It's almost 5 and I just got tagged. Someone from purchasing sent a report that needs to be converted to a PDF and placed on the web site. If I don't do it now, then tomorrow morning I'll get another nastygram, insinuating that I'm not doing my job. If I do it now, I'll be late for a board meeting on the other end of town.

I'm going to the board meeting. But I'm going to throw a high stick here and tell purchasing that I got their request and will do it in the morning. That way they can't complain. Well, they can, but I responded, so neener neener.