Forgetting to attach attachments, not

We’ve all done it: written an email that references “the attached file” and then forgotten to attach the attachment. Sometimes we realize this and send a second message, usually titled something like “I am an idiot!” with the attachment. Sometimes we don’t realize this, and get back a flurry of messages from our correspendents with subject lines like “You are an idiot!”.

When I was young and footloose and working at the Royal Ontario Museum translating FORTRAN programs into BASIC, and working, on the side, in Turbo Pascal, Gene Wilburn, the director of IT at the Museum, gave me a very useful programming trick: when you’re writing a program and have occasion (as one often does in Pascal) to use a curly bracket ({) which will later need to be closed, simply type, in advance, the closing bracket at the same time, and fill in the “middle” afterwards.

I’ve used this technique ever since, and it’s saved me a lot of hunting around trying to figure out where my mis-matched brackets are.

So in the spirit of Gene’s sage advice, I offer the following similar suggestion: when you are composing an email with an attachment, and you type the word “attached,” as you inevitably will, at that very second you should actually attach the file.

So the progression would go something like this:

Dear Bob,

I have attached

…and here you break and actually attach the file to the message, after which you continue…

the spreadsheet you requested.

Cheers,
Peter

Get into the habit of doing this, and you will never be called (or be forced to call yourself) an idiot again!