Outlook Anxiety

Outlook Anxiety.

You’ve suffered from it. You’ll recognize the symptoms. A drying of the mouth. A raising of the heartbeat. Sweat on the forehead as the body’s temperature increases. That strange, existentialist feeling that you are utterly helpless and alone, despite being surrounded by colleagues.

And all brought on by clicking that innocent-looking little yellow icon on your computer’s ‘Start” menu. The icon that opens your work emails.

As the programme loads itself, your mind is a-whir at the possible horrors which it may introduce into your day. Someone making a request that adds to an already heavy workload perhaps. Or, even worse, the reminder about work that you should have done but forgot about. It could be a complaint from someone about something. Then there is the worst possibility of all – the summons to a “closed door meeting” with the boss.

Before your Inbox even appears on your screen, you are frantically searching for a “cancel” button, something – anything – that will keep you in blissful ignorance and give you plausible deniability in the event that worst case scenarios come to pass. But it’s too late. Clicking the icon is like plunging a detonator. Once it is done, no power on Earth can undo it – you can only wait until the explosion and pray that you survive it.

The window begins to build itself before your eyes and you spot the cruel design feature that some diabolical techno-geek has included, having, no doubt, fiendishly predicted just such a situation as you are now in. You can only see the names of your emails’ senders; you have no hint of what any of them say until you open one up. You scan the names in a state of growing panic.

On most occasions, you find nothing but the banal and the unsolicited. Relief hits you like a rainstorm after a drought. You take a few deep breaths, tell yourself that you’ve just been silly, that everything's okay, you're fine… but the clock is already ticking down to the next time that you must click the icon. You can hear it at the back of your mind, a quiet, patient sound that will grow ever louder and more shrill until you sit back down in front of that impersonal screen and again move the cursor over that sneering little icon, that terrifying, deadly –

That’s if there’s nothing to worry about. You enter a whole new dimension of fear when a name you did not want to see jumps out at you. Tentatively, you click on the message. More often than not, even now, the email contains the mundane – in which case, default to the start of the previous paragraph. Once in a while, though, you see such words as, “Can I see you for a meeting in my office/study at such and such a time?”

From that moment onwards, you are a dead man walking. You can see no possibility of the meeting being for your benefit. Between the opening of the message and your attendance at the meeting, your imagination is a crucible in which various plotlines – most of which end up with your sacking/arrest/sacking followed by arrest/sacking followed by arrest followed by suicide – are constructed, deconstructed and re-constructed. Outlook has become your gateway to a personal hell.

Now, I am sure that this condition is not confined to education and people in other industries are always keen to point out that their removal from an organization can be effected far more easily than is the case for a teacher. That may be true, but so is the fact that in few other occupations is so much at stake. That there is a lot of pressure on education professionals is undeniable. If only Outlook was not so perfectly calibrated to add to it…