Government Agency Achieves New Milestone: Zero Percent of Emails Read

The Department of Communications Oversight achieved an unprecedented administrative milestone last week when an internal audit revealed that not a single incoming email has been read by any employee since the department migrated to a new email platform in September 2021. The discovery was made by IT contractor Dale Subnet, who was brought in to investigate why the department's average email response time had gradually increased from two days in 2020 to infinity. 'The migration went smoothly from a technical standpoint,' Subnet explained. 'Every email sent to the department has been received and stored. The issue is that someone configured a mail rule during the migration that routes all incoming messages to a folder called Pending Review. Nobody told anyone the folder existed.' The Pending Review folder currently contains 847,000 unread emails, including 12,000 from other government agencies, 340 from members of Congress, 4 subpoenas, and an estimated 600,000 newsletters nobody subscribed to. 'We were wondering why things had been so quiet,' said department director Patricia Outbox. 'But we assumed it was because our policies were working so well that nobody had anything to communicate.' The department continued to send emails throughout the period, creating what Subnet called 'a one-way communication channel operating under the delusion of dialogue.' Several important policy decisions were made based on what the department interpreted as unanimous agreement from stakeholders, which was in fact total unawareness. 'We sent a proposed regulation to 400 agencies and received zero objections,' Outbox said. 'We thought it was our best work. Turns out nobody saw it.' The regulation is now in effect. Subnet has corrected the mail rule, and the department is now confronting the task of reading 847,000 emails. A committee has been formed to develop a prioritization framework. The committee's first meeting invitation was sent via email and has not yet been acknowledged.