International Law

NB. Reading this post from the screen will make you green!

Every email my sister a friend sends me from her work account has at the end of the email:

PS. Reading this email from the screen will make you green!

As this has actually bugged me some time, I could not agree more with Michael Arrington's recent rant at TechCrunch titled "Hey, You Condescending Jerk, No One Prints Emails Anyway":

I know it?s all the rage right now to be green. but is it really necessary to put a line at the bottom of every email telling me to consider the environment and not to print it?

It was fine when just a few people did it last year (it was a ding against their startup, but didn?t necessarily kill a story), but now a significant percentage of emails coming in every day have some variation of the ?do not print this email? message. Not everyone does it, just the condescending holier-than-thou types. But it happens often enough to have become a serious annoyance. For background on the ?movement,? see this article.

You know what? I don?t need you to tell me that I need to be a good Earth citizen. I don?t print emails (no one does, you idiots), but if someone wants to I have no problem with it. Maybe they want to print out a map or something. I don?t think that makes them a bad person.

The same people who insist on wearing colored rubber bracelets to show their support for the cause du jour put this crap at the bottom of emails. My suspicion is that they don?t particularly care about the issue, they just want credit from everyone that they are a caring, thoughtful human being.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on February 04, 2008 (boomark / email).