I have this email in my inbox that refuses to be marked as read. I’ve read it probably five times at this point. In fact, it’s not even a message to me, but a tentative acceptance of a meeting I’m holding this afternoon. No matter what I do, I can’t seem to mark it as read. I’m worried about this means, both for my present and for my future. What if having a red ‘1’ badge on my Outlook icon in my Mac OS dock distracts me all day today? Every time I start to get any work done, I’ll mouse down to the dock and try to read that email. Over the course of a day I’ll do this literally one thousand times. I’ll spend my whole workday being distracted by this one unread email. Then I’ll have to account for my hours and that’s when the real trouble starts. Somebody is going to be unhappy if I bill my time spent attempting to read this email to a project.

Now, here’s where things really start to go bad for me. This is going to go on all week, and then for many weeks henceforth. At some point I’ll have a project deliverable due and it will be clear I haven’t done anything other than attempt to mark this email as read for several weeks. “Where’s my tagline?” a creative director will ask. “Unread? More like unDREAD,” I’ll say, before explaining that that is a tagline for a spooky email program that doesn’t let you mark emails as read (or perhaps a special shampoo that lets you turn your white guy dreadlocks back into normal white guy hair). I’ll suggest we should create this and sell it. It’ll be a hit! And I’ll punctuate the whole thing with “Spooktacular!” And then I will be fired.