forty x forty
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-eight years and a million words
Tokyo, 2008.04.14
Working for a gigantic bureaucracy is sometimes amusingly predictable (or vice versa). One of the things I keep seeing, year in and year out is the "forty by forty email thread". Forty people on the distribution list, and forty emails long.
It typically is a thread hashing out some technical issue, and it usually doesn't have forty participants (it can be as few as two) but it persists and drags people in like a net.