Years ago there was a film with this exact premise. An offbeat scientist (Jeff Goldblum) invents the first artificial heart, and a cardiologist (Donald Sutherland) installs it to save a patient's life. The patient becomes anxious because her pulse has been replaced with a constant shshshshshsh sound. The film was Threshold (1981).

Shut up, Wesley!

A couple of years ago I invested $10 in a metal travel wallet that functions as a de facto Faraday Cage. Or you could spend 8x that on a microwoven stainless steel version...

Now that I think about it I do have my own distilled list of rules for business e-mail and it's not far from the above. But what surprises me is how taking time to write clear, concise emails with easily read ordered lists can be reduced to a useless exercise. Am I crazy to observe that there are many people in the corporate world who simply can't read or write beyond an elementary level? How do people graduate from universities in this country without being able to author a simple written argument? I receive several meaningless emails every week from such people, but I suppose my emails to them must seem equally meaningless. The disparity in literacy levels between correspondents is what creates the potential for misunderstandings.

So I think that in a business environment it's a mistake to rely upon e-mail for anything critical - I can't forget that some of my colleagues receive hundreds of non-spam e-mails each week, and I can't reasonably expect them to filter through all of that (much of it meaningless, remember) to determine what's truly important. So I keep my e-mails as simple as possible (but no simpler) and follow everything up with phone calls and face-to-face interaction.

After a week of keeping it simple however, it's always relaxing to sit down and put pen to paper to write a letter to someone, or to exchange lengthier personal e-mail missives with someone that I know well.