REPORT: Coworker who emailed you currently en route to your desk to tell you he emailed you

WORLDWIDE—Hey, sorry, just real quick? He just wants to let you know he sent you an email whenever you have a chance to look at it. No rush. He says no rush, and yet here he suddenly is, having teleported to your desk 5.2 nanoseconds after writing you.

A new study out today suggests that the earth's coworkers are constitutionally incapable of sending an email without immediately physically materializing in front of the recipient to inform him or her about the email that was just sent.

"We just can't make sense of it, and our team has 17.5 PhDs between us," muses lead researcher Ross J. Belmont. "Is it that your coworker somehow doesn't trust the internet to safely deliver his email to you? Why, though? I could understand it if this were 1998 and he'd fired up his crotchety modem to bid his note a safe passage through the treacherous backwaters of Geocities. But come on. It's 2017. If you sent an email, it got there. Thanks."

The study claims that the particular subject matter of the email is not remotely important: coworkers will instantly follow up in person regardless of whether the message was about a sales meeting, a request to grab coffee, or a hilarious chinchilla video.

In an effort to further understand the curious phenomenon, the researchers looked at the hugely damaging psychological effects on a typical employee who was unable to physically locate his coworker moments after emailing her.

"We observed an instance where Nathaniel, an employee at Rogers head office in Toronto, fired off a budget template to his colleague Alana as she had requested. He then leapt up from his desk with the agility and ferocity of a tiny Olympic gymnast. Tragically, when he arrived at Alana's desk, she wasn't there. Maybe she was in a meeting, or in the bathroom."

The researchers describe the obvious and immediate storm that began brewing inside Nathaniel's psyche as he paced up and down the length of Alana's desk, terrified to think how she'd go about her day without the crucial piece of information he and he alone held on his very lips: that he had emailed her.

"He grew very pale, agitated, and despondent," reports Belmont. "You could see him wrestling with the question of whether to wait around Alana's desk, and for how long, or whether to slink back to his workspace like a chump. He picked up a Post-It Note and a pen. He began writing. He crumpled it up. At that point, his eyes were brimming with hot tears."

The study concluded that it actually poses a significant health risk if people are for whatever reason not able to verbally inform a coworker of a recent email.

"We realize it's incredibly annoying for the person on the receiving end," Belmont sighs sympathetically. "But we simply can't jeopardize the health of the workforce by forbidding or preventing this unavoidable office behaviour. Global economic productivity will suffer. The markets will crash."

"Now if you will excuse me," Belmont added as he stood up. "I emailed my co-researcher a few minutes ago about getting Korean barbecue for lunch tomorrow to celebrate the release of our study, and I have to go find him at his desk and recite my message verbatim to his exact face."

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