Spam, Spam, and More Spam

I continue to get excess amounts of spam at work right to my inbox. This is beginning to affect productivity. I received over one hundred spam messages Monday through Thursday a few weeks ago. Here is the time by which I received one hundred (starting from 8:00 a.m.):

More Spam

The spam at work seems to be getting worse. It's not even going into the junk mail folder most of the time anymore, which makes for a lot of wasted time deleting stuff. I read how one company actually did away with e-mail because of how much time it often wasted. Alas, e-mail is probably my favorite way to communicate at work, and possibly anywhere. I don't think I'd like that. Here are the spam totals from a few days in August.

Spam E-mail

Gmail does a pretty good job of keeping spam away. I receive only 1 to 4 pieces of spam per day in any one of my accounts, and it's rare that they go to anything other than the spam folder. These accounts include one posted publicly online that anyone could write to and one I give out specifically "for spam" (you know, when the grocery store, etc., insists on an e-mail address).

By contrast, my work e-mail address is inundated with spam each day, to a point where sometimes I feel like the spam interferes with productivity (especially since, if I'm writing an e-mail at a given moment when new mail arrives, I have to click out of the program and then back in it in order to continue writing). In addition the spam filter seems ridiculously ineffective, this despite the fact that I often mark mail as "junk," which is supposed to help the system learn to recognize such mail. I'm not sure why the ineffectiveness is like so, but here's a typical week.

I say typical, but actually Tuesday and Wednesday of the week featured here were not. E-mail was down completely for much of the day both days; strangely, I didn't have as much spam waiting for me once the e-mail system was back up as I likely would have received had I been in my account.

The amount of spam hasn't always been this prolific. I had fewer junk e-mails when I first started. My years of being in my position have likely added to the amount of spam I get (as they have to other long-time employees). In addition, I've noticed rises and falls in the amount I receive. Right now, I'm at a high level; however, I've also seen times when these numbers dropped to half what they are.

Life Timeline

Some things don't go quite as one might desire. Actually, I never had much faith that I would win a Pulitzer, but it was nice to dream. However, I'm still waiting on the first book publication (many a writer ten or fifteen years younger than me has a published book now; I don't know that I ever had an age in mind, but certainly by age thirty), and on that wife (around thirty) and kids (around thirty-five). I'm forty-two now, quite a few years past those ideal ages. At least I've had steady jobs that I've mostly enjoyed, in what would have been my dream profession and in my dream location (I wanted to work as an editor at a publisher in the West or South, then later as I refined my desires, as an editor at a university press in a small university town--and that's what I do and where I live).

Offices versus Cubicles

So in my various jobs I've had offices, cubicles, and shared offices. I thought it might be interesting to break down how many years I've spent in each:

What's even more pronounced to me when I look at this chart? I've been in the workforce for over twenty years!

Length of Time in Offices versus Jobs

In June, I moved to a new office in a new (to me) building, though I did not move to a new job. This made me wonder how long I've spent in my various offices in general and how that compared to how long I've stayed in various jobs.

Here's how many years I've stayed in respective offices (numbers are of course greatly rounded):

When I break it down by place, it looks like I moved around the most at Harcourt and had the longest stays in my current job:

Jobs I've Dreamed of versus Jobs I've Had

I'd say I've done fairly well in terms of actually working in fields in which I have an interest, as can probably be surmised by the handy timeline below.
The timeline shows my main dream job at top, my main real jobs at bottom. This isn't exhaustive, though, because I have had part-time second jobs, and there have been other jobs I've dreamed of having. For example, at various times, I've thought how need it would be to be a screenwriter, an amusement park ride designer, a fruit farmer, a comedian, a radio deejay, a publisher, and a designer or compositor. In real life, I've done a little deejaying (for pay--it was not something, in the end, that I enjoyed), and I've done some design and composition and screenwriting just for fun.

But I'm blessed that the job I really desired from about my teen years on became the one that I have. I often ponder what I would do instead were I to have to choose another career, and the fact is I don't know.