Area Man Sends Self Email

CHICAGO (AP) -- A Wicker Park man has been spamming his own mailbox in order to fill the void of a boring day at work. Luke Penca, 30, works as a technology consultant for a local firm and has entirely too much time on his hands it would seem.

"I just can't get through a Friday afternoon without the 'ding' of arriving messages," said a frustrated Penca. "I'll add my buddies to the distribution list in the faint hopes of a courtesy laugh response email."

Mr. Penca's latest drivel examines the mundane minutiae of a life unfulfilled. His work, while prodigious, lacks any overall structure or meaning and often serves no purpose but to exist for its own sake.

Andrew H., an attorney and acquaintance of Penca, is exasperated by the emails he has received. "I bill out upwards of $200 per hour and I've got to wade through this torrent of email. I mean, come on, I can't ignore my Inbox. What if a client sent me a note or TheOnion passed along a teaser message? Really."

The productivity loss of Penca's emails are staggering says John H., a valuations expert who received his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago's elite business school and is also a friend of Penca.

"I figure that each message wastes a half hour of lost concentration for me personally," he said. "When you extrapolate that amount across the list of friends receiving the email, and some of those guys barely know [Penca], it's overwhelming."

Addiction cited

But all may not be lost for Penca as his friends plan to hold an intervention.

"We're going to sit him down and tell him how his actions hurt us all," said Chris T., another one of Penca's friends. "If that doesn't work, I'm going to break his thumbs so he can't type. Or at least type as fast. Hell, I've punched people in the face for less."

Until that happens, however, Penca's friends will have to endure a steady stream of meaningless messages being cast into cyberspace, where they have little choice but to delete them as fast as they can.

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Technorati: Satire, Humor, Funny, Chicago, Snarky, Lukateake