"First my attention was caught by an article about the Gillette takeover. A US Government official had demanded access to all of Gillette’s corporate e-mails for the period in question. But he had been rebuffed by a judge, simply because his demand was ludicrous. Gillette’s staff, it seems, churn out no fewer than 14 million e-mails a month. Yes, 14 million. Assume that each takes just 25 seconds to write and five seconds to read and delete. My maths may not be as sharp as Gillette’s finest blades, but I reckon that still amounts to 1.4 million employee-hours a year.
Yet no sooner had I cranked my jaw back to its usual anchorage, an inch below my upper dentures, than I came across a yet-more-startling statistic. Tesco is now sending 20 million e-mails to its customers each month, making Gillette’s execs look like slouches in their bestowal of cyberspatial salutations. And then, because all bizarre things come in threes, my eye alighted on the e-mail statistic to cap them all. Bill Gates now receives so many e-mails — four million a day — that he employs a whole secretariat to fillet his in-box. (Connoisseurs of irony will be delighted to know that 95 per cent of its contents are spam-mail.)
Compared with that, the rest of humanity may seem to have escaped lightly. OK, we generate 50 billion e-mails a day. Yet that works out at only eight for every man, woman and child on the planet. "
"only eight" per head per day? Seems a lot to me...
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