Hillary Clinton used only her personal email account during her four years as US secretary of state. She may – or may not – have violated federal records. The whole thing has caused quite some uproar.
Well, get this: I have used only my personal email account for the last 12 hours in my role as a journalist at the Guardian, and I’m here to tell you what I have learned.
Before we begin, it is worth noting that Clinton and I were not performing exactly the same roles. As secretary of state Clinton was responsible for organising the US State Department and the US Foreign Service. Clinton was the president’s chief foreign affairs adviser, and was required to take part in high-level negotiations with foreign countries.
In my job I do not have responsibility for any departments, nor do I advise Barack Obama. I do not negotiate with other countries (and will not!).
But anyway. Let’s focus on what we do have in common: we both used our personal emails. What about my experience?
Initially, it was great. Mostly because no one from work could get in touch with me. No one knew my personal email address. So I was still free to speak to whichever colleagues I chose, but only when I decided to initiate the conversation. It was just as if I had been fired, but without the tears.
Obviously this could not last. Upon sending that first email to a colleague, the spell was broken. They had my contact details. I might as well be doing proper work instead of preparing to write this article.
It got worse. In our morning news meeting my personal email address was announced to everyone. Disaster! Then it got better. They had not announced my correct personal email address. Hurrah! I was back to relative anonymity.
As well as having no bosses to tell me to write this or film that, I quickly noticed that by using my personal email I was spared the tyranny of the office-wide email.
There were no messages about someone having lost a phone at a desk, or a book in a room, or some underpants in a shower. No emails telling me I had been invited to a meeting, or that I had been uninvited to a meeting, or that by god I had better be at such a meeting if I knew what was good for me. No gifs of cats, or of cartoon characters I didn’t recognise, or TV shows I had never seen.
I bet Hillary appreciated all that too.
It was going great. I hadn’t a care, or an email, in the world.
Except … I did. I was a slave to my personal email account, where all sorts of things would come back to haunt me.
Seeing as I had nothing to do, I thought I might as well have a clear-out of the hundreds of unread messages festering in my personal account. Most of them were promotional offers. But in-between the dick pumps and Duane Reade points were real emails people had sent me or I had sent myself.
Emails I had either skimmed and dumped back in there, promising myself I would read and reply at a later date, or correspondence I had just never looked at in the first place.
So it was that as I hacked away at the email undergrowth a message from an ex-girlfriend, sent around Christmas, loomed into view. Then one from a long-lost family member, whom I had found, got back in touch with and now fallen out of touch with again. There was a draft for that sitcom, last worked on sometime in 2013.
You’d hope Hillary has a firmer grasp on her life, clearly, but the point is the same: there’s no hiding place when you’ve only got one email account. Whether it’s a message about North Korea or about your cousin’s birthday party that you don’t want to go to, it all has to be processed.
Other things.
I did not have certain email addresses saved in my personal account. I could not find log-ins that were saved deep in my work account. I could not Gchat colleagues – at least not as easily. I could still instant message people, but they invariably noticed I was using my personal account, and that dominated the chat. Had I got hot gossip? Had I been sacked? What the hell did I think I was playing at? (The last from one of my editors who was unaware of the experiment and had been trying to contact me.)
But Hillary would not have had any of these problems. She had streamlined everything into one place.
And over these past 12 hours, I’ve realised: so have I. The problem is: I’ve streamlined it all into my work email account.
All my work stuff is in there. Most of my social correspondence is not done by email, but if it is, it’s usually on my work account. If I register for a social media site, I use my work email address. If I’m getting a receipt sent to an email address, I use my work one. (I’ve got an idea that I’m less likely to get ripped off, but that hasn’t always proved to be the case).
So it turns out we’re not that different, Hillary Rodham Clinton and I. We use one email address, you see. We find it easier. We streamline.
Oh and there is another thing: we both like to keep our emails away from government servers.
