“Oh, I don’t really check my email.”
Whenever I hear this, I despair. On the last occasion, had I not been in my happy place at the time (due to just having been given a load of extra money in my budget), I would have killed the offender where she stood. I had a 7-year old Toshiba laptop in my hand at the time, and it would have died a glorious and honourable death being used to inflict blunt force trauma.
Right now there is an ongoing issue with email in the school. Chiefly, that the provision is a bit shit. It’s hosted off-site, and one can access it in one of two irritating ways:
- Login to webmail with a username that is different from the school network login, and be logged out automatically after 15 minutes, or
- manually configure Outlook to collect email via POP3.
Neither of these are convenient for end users, and are sufficiently inconvenient that a large proportion of the staff simply go weeks (or even months) at a time without checking their email, much to the irritation of senior staff who are desperately trying to use email more widely throughout the school.
In the next few months, the email provision will be brought on-site and Outlook will be automatically configured for everyone. After that, there will be no excuse, and the killings will begin in earnest.

