(Fire)walls come tumbling down

One thing more irritating than wading through the drivel in the tabloids (including the Sunday Mirror's "exclusive" story on a Telford couple fined over their rubbish - which we at the Star reported on 15 days earlier!) when on Sunday duty it wading through the drivel that comes in on email.

Actually, this irritation is not confined to a Sunday, but at the weekend there's only one of you on duty and you can't fob it off on anyone else.

It's not helped by our state of the ark email system, which makes opening and deleting each message a battle of epic proportions. People have met, fallen in love and gone off and got married in the time it's taken me to clear my inbox.

Firstly there's the thing that irritates email users the world over. Spam. This Sunday, for example, I have had the pleasure of being invited to email back a nice girl who was feeling tired and hoped I wanted to see her pictures.

I can only assume she had been somewhere nice on holiday and, despite suffering jet lag, wanted me to see some of the panoramic vistas she had captured on her Canon Sureshot.

I was also offered Viagra. Twice. At least I think I was. The first email started: "fashion statement, an advertising ploy, a moral issue, and a can make anything and set it so it can be manipulated in any way becoming more involved in similar networks in the future. sledgehammerhead sharks, and what a surprise, eightyfour crabs, walls at home".

Eh? The second read: "Sie leben nur einmal - warum dann nicht was neues ausprobieren?" But the offer of a "Viaaaagra" 10 pack for 21 Euro meant I didn't have to spreken to much Deutsch to get the gist.

After that there are the bizarre emails that, on first reading, appear to make no sense. On second reading, however, it becomes clear they make no sense.

Like Ted, who apparently includes the people at the Shropshire Star among his "dear, dear friends". He wanted us to take a walk (anywhere) and make a note of at least 500 (!) individual things in our environment that are not in any way threatening.

If we saw anything that made us laugh or experience an emotion of any kind, we were asked to make a special note of it and then email him.

I looked around my newsroom. I couldn't see anything that I considered unthreatening and the emotions I experienced in a deserted office at 5.30pm on a sunny Sunday should not be repeated here.

Finally there is the worst of the lot. Emails from PR companies, the vast majority of which are of no interest to a regional newspaper.

This, unfortunately, does not stop the person who has sent it out from their plush, Ikea furnished office in London's Dockland from calling (usually not the same day or even the day after, but perhaps three of four days later) to make sure we got it.

For some reason a lot of these people are Australian, and even if they are not they have a very slim grasp of where Shropshire is.

"We have a story about someone from your area."

"Oh, good. Where are they from?"

"Sutton Coldfield."

That sort of thing.

It was worse when I worked in Wrexham, which these people seemed to assume was next door to Cardiff.

But most of us can't bring ourselves (when asked in the, usually, soft girly girly voice) to offend the person on the other end of the phone.

"Did you get the press release?"

The correct answer should be that we get about 1,000 emails a day and unless there was a specific interest to us it would have just been deleted. That rarely gets said.

So, sorry any PR people reading this. But if you ever hear a voice on the end of the phone saying: "I forwarded it to our features writers and I'm sure they'll give you a call if they need anything else," you can make a reasonable stab at where your email's ended up. It's next to the viagra.

By Dave Burrows