Welcome to lesson 2 of ESLPod.com's Using English at Work.
I'm your host, Dr. Jeff McQuillan, from the Center for Educational Development.
In the first lesson of using English at Work, we learn vocabulary about arriving at work or getting to the office.
In the second lesson, we're going to talk about checking email, mail, and voice mail at work.
Let's get started by listening to the story of this part of my day at a slow speed.
The first thing I do when I get to work each morning is to check my inboxes.
I go to the mail room to check my mail slot to see what mail has arrived overnight.
There are always a lot of Intra Office and Inter Office letters and memos.
Much of it is junk mail, so I spend a few minutes sorting through it.
The next thing I do is to turn on my computer to check email.
I open my email program and my new messages automatically download into my inbox.
Even though I have a pretty good spam filter, I still check through my trash folder carefully to make sure nothing important was filtered out.
We're also not supposed to get personal emails at work, but sometimes my friends send or forward me messages to this address, and I have to make sure I respond using my personal email address.
When I don't have time to finish a message or when I get interrupted, I save it into my draft folder.
Finally, I check my voicemail.
I call the voicemail system and enter in my pin to bypass the outgoing message.
I have two new messages, and after listening to them, I save one of them and delete the other.
I look at the clock, and it's already 9.30am.
It's time for the morning meeting.
We begin our story by saying that the first thing I do when I get to work each morning is to check my inboxes.
An inbox is an electronic space or a real box that holds emails or if it's a real box, papers, and other things that you need to read and respond to.
In an email program, the inbox is usually the main screen.
On your desk, it's probably a small box that other people put papers into.
I check my inboxes, meaning that I look to see if there is anything inside them.
First I go to the mail room.
A mail room is a room in a large office building where mail is organized so that it can be given to the right person.
Offices with many employees might receive thousands of pieces of mail, so they need to have special employees who work in the mail room and make sure that each piece of mail gets to the right person.
You may start out in a company by working in the mail room, which is usually considered the lowest level job in a company.
Some people think that if you work hard enough, you can start in the mail room and someday be president, although I don't think that happens very often in most companies.
When I'm in the mail room, I check my mail slot to see what mail has arrived overnight.
A slot is normally a small rectangular opening in something, but a mail slot is a small box that has a person's name on it and holds mail for that person.
Some houses have mail slots in their front doors.
I live in an older house where we still have a mail slot in our door.
Many houses now, however, have mail boxes.
These are little boxes outside of your house.
In the story, I'm talking about the mail slots in the mail room in the office building where I work.
There are always a lot of intra office and inter office letters in my mail slot.
An intra INTRA hyphen office letter is one that is sent and received within one office building.
An INTR INTR hyphen office letter is one that is sent between offices of the same company.
For example, if I work at a large bank and I want to send something to a customer, I put it in the regular mail.
I use in the United States, the US Postal Service.
I put a stamp on it. I put it in the mailbox and it is delivered to the other company.
If I want to send something to someone who works for my company, my bank, but in another office, perhaps in the other side of the city, then I put it in inter office mail.
This way, at the end of the day, someone will carry a large bag with all the inter office mail to the other office because this is cheaper and usually much faster than using the regular public mail.
If I need to send something to someone who works in my office in the same building, but I'm feeling lazy and I don't want to take the time to walk to his or her desk, I'll put it in the intra INTRA office mail and at the end of the day, someone will deliver all the inter office mail to the right people who work in my office building or put it in the right mail slot for that person.
My mail slot has a lot of intra office and inter office letters and memos.
A memo is short for Memorandum.
It's usually a short written document that describes something at your workplace, usually with four lines at the top.
The name of the person who wrote the memo, the name of the person it's going to, the subject of the memo and the date it was written.
Busy people often don't have time to listen to people talk about their ideas or to read long reports.
The writing up a one-page memo is a good way to let those people know about the most important ideas.
Companies often use memos to provide information quickly to their employees.
Many of the letters and memos I receive are what I call junk mail.
Uncanny mail is mail or email that doesn't have any useful or helpful information in it.
It's the mail that you throw away or delete from your email program without reading.
It's mail that you didn't ask for and that you don't want.
The word for junk mail when we're talking about email is spam.
At my house, most of the junk mail I get are advertisements that I don't want, so I throw them away without even reading them.
At the office, I spend a few minutes sorting through the junk mail.
The sort means to put things in order or to divide things into different groups or categories.
In this case, I'm separating the junk mail from the mail I really want to read.
You might, for example, sort your clothes by color or you might sort your papers in alphabetical order from A to Z.
After sorting through my junk mail, I turn on my computer to check email.
I open my email program and my new messages automatically download into my inbox.
To download means to copy a file from the internet or a large network computer onto your own computer.
Many people like to download music or videos from the internet.
My email gets downloaded from the company's large computer servers into my inbox, the electronic space for new messages that I need to read.
I have a pretty good spam filter, a spam filter is usually part of your email program that keeps or prevents spam unwanted emails from coming into your email inbox.
We say the spam filter traps a lot of emails for advertisements and other things I never asked for to trap here means to get to hold and not to let go so that you don't see them when you open your inbox.
Sometimes a spam filter is too high and it puts emails that you want to see into the trash or spam folder by accident or by mistake.
When you talk about a spam filter being high that means it's trapping too many messages.
That's why I still check through my trash folder carefully to make sure nothing important was trapped or filtered out.
Trash is another word for garbage or something that you throw away that you don't want.
So your trash folder is where the email program may put trash, things you don't want.
Many email programs have a separate spam folder where all the spam messages go.
When I check through my trash folder I look at all the messages in the folder just to make sure they're really trash or things I don't want anymore so I can read any messages that were put there by accident.
When I'm supposed to at my office get personal emails at work but sometimes my friends send or forward me messages to my work address to forward something.
In this case means to send an email that you have received to other people.
Sometimes my friends and relatives forward funny jokes although usually they're not very funny.
They didn't write the jokes but they received them from other people and then forward them to their friends.
When my friends forward messages to my work email address I have to make sure I respond to or answer them using my personal email address, not my work email address.
When I don't have time to finish a message or when I get interrupted I save my message into my draft folder.
A draft is an unfinished document or something that you have begun to write but have not yet finished.
You go through many drafts usually when we write things especially formal reports.
We hope that each time we write a new draft or revise or change the draft it gets better.
A draft folder is where an email program puts messages that you have started writing but aren't ready to send yet.
You still haven't finished them.
Later when you have time you can go back to your draft folder finish writing the message that you started earlier and then send it to someone after you finished it.
Finally or lastly I check my voice mail.
Voice mail is a system of recorded voice messages from people who call your phone number when you aren't able to answer your phone.
We used to have what we called answering machines which had cassette tapes to record messages but most companies today are computerized and they use something that we call voice mail.
At my house however we still have one of the old answering machines not voice mail.
I call the voice mail system and enter in my pin.
Pin is an acronym where each letter is the first letter of another word here pin means personal identification number.
A pin is usually a set of secret numbers 4 to 6 that are used as a password for getting information or for getting money when you take cash out of an ATM or bank machine you usually have to enter your pin.
You might also have a pin for registering for a class at college.
The pin I'm talking about here is for listening to my voice mail messages.
When using voice mail you can often use your pin to bypass the outgoing message.
To bypass something means to skip something or to go around something that you don't want to see or hear.
For example many websites have introductory screens sometimes with video and music.
You can usually bypass this introduction, the screens by clicking on skip introduction or skip this.
To skip is the same as to go to the next step without looking or seeing the current screen.
When I call the voice mail system it usually plays my outgoing message, the message people here when they call me.
But by entering my pin I bypass that outgoing message because I don't need to hear it.
After listening to two new messages I save one and I delete the other.
To save means to keep something for use in the future.
It's the opposite of delete or throw away.
We usually save important emails from our friends, we save photos that were taken when we were with our friends.
In this case I'm saving a voice mail message so that it stays in the voice mail system and I'm able to listen to it later.
I delete the other message.
I get rid of the other message.
We usually delete drafts once we finished the final document, for example.
In this case I'm deleting the second voice mail message, getting rid of it because I don't need to listen to it again.
Next I look at my clock and I see that it's already 9.30 am.
It's time for my morning meeting.
Let's listen again to this story of checking email, mail and voice mail.
This time the story will be read at a normal speed.
The first thing I do when I get to work each morning is to check my inboxes.
I go to the mail room to check my mail slot to see what mail has arrived overnight.
There are always a lot of inter office and inter office letters and memos.
Much of it is junk mail so I spend a few minutes sorting through it.
The next thing I do is to turn on my computer to check email.
I open my email program and my new messages automatically download into my inbox.
Even though I have a pretty good spam filter, I still check through my trash folder carefully to make sure nothing important was filtered out.
We're also not supposed to get personal emails at work, but sometimes my friends send or forward me messages to this address and I have to make sure I respond using my personal email address.
When I don't have time to finish a message or when I get interrupted, I save it into my draft folder.
Finally, I check my voice mail.
I call the voice mail system and enter in my pen to bypass the outgoing message.
I have two new messages and after listening to them I save one of them and delete the other.
I look at the clock and it's already 9.30 am.
It's time for the morning meeting.
That's the end of our second lesson.
In our next lesson, number three, I'm going to talk about attending or going to an office meeting.
This course has been a production of the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.
Visit our website at PSLPOD.com.
This course was produced by Dr.
Jeff McQuillan and Dr. Lucy Saye.
Copyright 2008.
