The terror has won.
Years ago, I worked in tech support for a large government facility. Joe, one of my co-workers–college age, libertarian, unhappy with the way things were run–had reached his breaking point with HR not letting him work at home. Pregnant women/recent mothers were allowed to work from home, though not officially. He spent a lot of time trying to convince them that it was unfair, but got nowhere. His tolerance gone, he decided to make a point about it.
He made this point by sending e-mail to the facility’s “Everyone” mailing list. These days, if you’re a corporate employee, you already see the problem. But this was, oh, maybe 1994 or 1995, the early days of modern corporate e-mail, so it wasn’t understood that this was an easy way to make a mess of the e-mail system. But that’s fine, pass that part over, because here’s the kicker: he started the mail with something like, “there’s something bothering me, and I have to get it off my chest or I’m going to go postal.”
That certainly got everyone’s attention. In tech support, we all got the mail, read it, and said to ourselves, “ah geez Joe, what are you doing now.” We knew him; we knew he wasn’t seriously contemplating picking up a gun and shooting random employees; in fact the phrase “go postal” did not even register with any of us as a problem. We had a sorta “ah, crud, people on the network are going to complain about this useless email” reaction. Joe wasn’t in our building at the time, so we couldn’t go to his desk and tell him not to be an idiot with the mailing lists, but for my part, I read it and processed it and forgot about it.
So we were sort of surprised to learn later that Joe had been escorted off the facility in handcuffs while people determined what kind of threat he presented. I couldn’t imagine why, until I heard from people in other buildings that the “going postal” references actually scared a lot of people, to the point they were too anxious to leave their offices until the threat was resolved. They had no idea who this Joe guy was or what the hell he was talking about, but they sure saw that he was thinking about going postal.
I mention all this because I’m trying to use my first “eh, so what” reaction to Joe’s e-mail, and the pointless panic that ensued, as a guide to understanding how Boston could’ve gone so apeshit insane over a couple cartoon Lite Brites.
