The noise of email
I've just switched groups at Microsoft, and for the first few days it felt strangely quiet in my new office. The acoustic background hadn't changed much: I could hear voices in the offices nearby, people still passed by in the hallway chatting (some stopped to welcome me), my phone still rang. But there was an odd silence. I realized my email inbox had gone quiet.
I'd removed myself from my old group's mailing lists, and hadn't yet been added to any lists in the new group. Only mail addressed directly to me was coming in. It was like a soundtrack had stopped playing. The silence was broken only by my own dialogues.
After a while, team status reports began to appear, document reviews, meeting requests. A little later, I was getting broader, group-wide notifications about security training, server maintenance and building structure examinations. By then, I had propagated back up the mailing list hierarchy of a new team, group and division and was reading about acquisitions and executive shuffles. The background music had started up again.
