Do people complain you're a little cold in emails? Writer and researcher Joanne McNeil has put together a Chrome extension that feigns enthusiasm on your behalf.
It's called 'Emotional Labour' and will scatter platitudes all over any email that you want to warm up. "It replaces serious words with playful ones, swaps out periods for exclamation marks, and a adds cheerful introductory text," explains McNeil on a post on Medium. "I was inspired to create the extension after many futile attempts to start using canned responses, but nothing in my life is structured for its use."
If you're suspecting at this point that the whole thing might be a bit tongue-in-cheek, you'd be right. "The Emotional Labor email extension looks fake. That's the point. I wanted to reveal my exhaustion, my fatigue in needing to attend to so much correspondence," says McNeil.
She says that it's a response to the dissonance she feels when trying to express emotions over email that she doesn't feel. "Until there's an emoticon for 'Things are kind of not great but I don't want to disturb you so let's just pretend things are fine,'" she says. "That's the grey area where this project resides." It's also a response to Romantimatic -- an app released in 2014 that automates sending "I love you" texts to your significant other. "Perhaps it may be of some use!!!! Or, at the very least, I hope you find it amusing!!!!!" says McNeil. Grab the extension from <a style="background-color: transparent;" href="http://emotional-labor.email/">emotional-labor.email</a>
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
