We agreed the new colour scheme on the fifth floor is garish and went our separate ways.

I was glad, and I am sure he was ecstatic, that no mention was made of the war we were waging from our offices. Nobody mentioned bold print, capital letters, exclamation marks, lack of amicable greeting, manic use of underline, malicious cc'ing and missing 'regards' at the end of our email missiles.

The rules of engagement in email are not those of real life exchanges, so where the two worlds co-exist there is little or no common ground.

Never shall those worlds collide.

Human converse is not always rigidly sincere, but at least when we meet a colleague on the stairs, we try to appear nice; we turn towards them, make eye contact, smile, nod and . . . if we really like them . . . mess with our hair.

When we enter the other world of fast, cheap, easy electronic text and email, all social rules and dutiful obligation are usurped.

Among friends, we're in a relatively safe zone as they have the advantage . . .

questionable, perhaps . . . of knowing us.

When we use email or text at work, it's a different story. Using email as a primary means of communicating with colleagues is not good. And like most things that are not good, it's great.

It allows us tell things to people who don't want to talk to us, or more thrilling still, force our musings on people intent on not listening. It allows us to invade the space of those who would never stop on the stairs and make them hear. That's its Number One attraction.

It means not having to stand up from our desks, thus avoiding exposure of our slightly stained shirt, or unkempt hair, weight gained or lustre lost to the cuties on the first floor.

Pretty advantageous this, although the telephone can function almost as well for this particular purpose.

In contentious situations, it leaves us in the controlling position as the originator of the 'essay' on why we are right and others are not . . . the subtext of most emails, it seems to me.

Emailing also allows us appear more rational and structured than we really are; it brings an air of calm consideration to the chaos of our minds so that even we are fooled at our Aristotelian wisdom when re-reading for the fourth time our masterpiece on strategic outsourcing or our treatise on training It also means we can forecast the future, as we know we'll get some message back which we can paw at our leisure until ready to press that send button again, maybe even adventuring to risque group-mail with the copy button, keeping the 'forward' option up our sleeve for a vicious viral moment.

Experience suggests that despite these alluring positives, the highs of frequent email use can be offset by often unintended harmful consequences . . . for ourselves.

That send button deserves more caution and respect than we give it because the use of email and the content of our email, is a very visible manifestation of our identity and often we have not aligned our true selves with our email persona. We expose aspects of our true personality through email which, in our regular daily routines, we have managed to hide; it's as though the subconscious leaks out through email when we have it well under wraps in habituated human exchanges.

As a medium of communication at work, it often betrays us; it impedes progress by encouraging short-term, frustrationrelieving mailing to the detriment of the longerterm, strategic, say-nothingyet option. It doesn't say what we want to say and it doesn't convey reality, as emotion is sieved out.

This former we know . . .

each time . . . about 30 minutes after sending reactive emails. We can clamber through 'sent items' to retrieve them but more often than not, all we can do is await the reply;

now we're in the 'you'll hear me whether you want to or not' seat. It's hot, and not in the good way.

Email can be so easily misinterpreted; sometimes, 'send me the file' can be read 'you're sacked' and mayhem, misunderstanding and interpersonal malaise ensues.

When email arrives with a smile as the content describes the sender's excitement about the upcoming holiday to Brazil, or when it pops up in the 'inbox' with a groan because a few pounds have been acquired, we can take it that technology may well take over the human kingdom in the thinking department.

But until then, we people really have got the upper hand and are selling ourselves short by forfeiting person to person contact for the series of one-way exchanges, full of absences and fundamentally disconnected, that emails usually are.

An elusive smile may be inferred from those dreaded happy face symbols and a bad temper implied by an underline, but none of the real emotional cues sensed directly by face to face contact can be revealed through email or virtual communication.

We are usurped too by the unparalleled abilities of the human mind to feather its own nest. This arises not from neurons aptly placed to make us feel good, but from a socially constructed mirror which makes us falsely believe we look or are 'doing' way better than we actually are.

This is evident in our belief in email, and it's a major reason why we like it, according to personality and social psychologists Justin Kruger and colleagues (2005) who showed that we think we communicate better via email than we actually do and it's this ill-founded sense of power which binds us to the medium so needily.

When we think of all the things that can go wrong in the work place, why is it that when the i-net/email goes down the anxiety produced is completely disproportionate?

Our false but comforting idea of how effective we are at emailing is one suggested answer.

Kruger did a series of experiments in which pairs of participants were asked to email each other messages with differing emotional content. Sarcasm seriousness, anger and sadness were among them.

Senders were then asked to rate how well the receiver would identify the message nuance. In face-to-face exchanges similar activities were carried out, showing that where email is concerned, senders overestimated their receiver's understanding significantly.

A kind of egocentrism is at the root of the findings and sometimes, we're just acting out for our own purpose instead of really addressing issues that need to be faced down, literally, by being there.

Long-winded emails are often less effective than the blink of an eye and can bring more complex problems than the one you started out trying to address.

Organisations are rapidly learning this, and new rules of engagement for email use are mushrooming in offices everywhere Keep it simple, is the best edict; otherwise, drop in. Smile optional.