Last week, the New Trier Administration sent out an email to explain the protocol that would be followed in the event of “light rain.” The email was so verbose and detailed that it created some unintended consequences: when New Trier parents and students tried to open it, their devices all spontaneously erupted into flames.
These ignitions wreaked havoc in the New Trier community. Houses caught on fire, hair was singed, piles of “late warnings” erupted into flames, and fire departments could not keep up with the demand.
Barry Oatson, one initial email “opener,” recalls his experience: “The heat I felt was nothing short of godly. It was as if the earth’s crust had split and the boiling inner core was spilling into my living room.” Oatson, like many other email recipients, was left only to scream for help as his school iPad, and all of his progress in HayDay, was lost to the heavens.
Desperate for answers, a select group of victims met with Principal Don Macmaffen to address their burning questions.
The original email was a fairly normal size for New Trier, Macmaffen explained, stretching across almost sixty pages to warn students that they might need umbrellas if a light rain shower were to occur. The school instructed its students to shelter in place if a dark cloud happened to float over the building. Adding further detail, it explained that raincoats were highly encouraged over umbrellas because raincoats could be carried more easily in the event of a leak inside the school. The email included a wide variety of graphs and charts, presenting results from student polls that were completely unrelated to the topic at hand. One poll asked 1000 students their opinions on the New Trier colors, and the pie chart in the email revealed that a staggering 47% expressed “strong dislike” for the traditional green and blue. The reason for this chart’s inclusion in the rain protocol remains unclear; however, investigation continues.
According to Macmaffen, the problem arose when Julianne Sharpe, a secretary at the school, edited the email and felt inspired to add a “little something” to spruce it up. Sharpe decided to attach an enormous GIF of the word “PROTOCOL” to the top of the email. The file size of the GIF was so large that if it were printed it would span from Panama City to Moscow. We discovered this by actually printing the GIF (for journalistic purposes of course). The GIF was in rainbow colors, and each letter bounced every few seconds, creating a distracting movement at the top of the page. In addition to the gargantuan font size, color, and animation, the GIF appeared to be on fire, and the animation of the fire spread down the pages of the email, encouraging the reader to wade through the information faster.
In addition to the calamitous GIF, another round of editing produced an even more gargantuan file, including random highlighted sections that seemed to hold little importance to the topic and a new font for each of the 30,023 paragraphs. In some cases, single letters were highlighted in the middle of words, and punctuation was put in bold and underlined.
We asked the secretary herself about her thought process while she edited. “I figured I would take a break from my usual schedule of solitaire and intermittent meetings regarding the addition of 23 more useless WiFi routers to the school system,” she explained, “so I began adding a little life to the highly important email. I simply thought it would brighten everyone’s day, and it seems it has done just that, in the form of flames.”
Though the lives of email-openers were in fact brightened for a split second, their houses have now been reduced to ash. To apologize for the enormous problems caused by the email, the school has decided to send a long email offering to pay for any “email-related damage.” This time, the GIF at the top will say “SORRY.”
