It's late, you need to talk to that key contact about the really important stuff you're doing for your boss, and can't you get hold of them? So where are they?
You do the logical thing and make a call to their office and get put through to a voice mail, you leave a message, and then press the hot key to get put through to their colleague who'll help if they're not available. But guess what? They're on voice mail, so you press the # sign after the beep and get put through to the switchboard. But in the time you've been pinging around their state of the art telephone system the security guards have come on for the evening and they are convinced that neither of the two people you want work at their office, so with true British helpfulness they tell you over and over again that it's not their problem and that you should call back in the morning.
Why not send a fax? It's bound to get through and you know the fax machine is next to their desk. But the bloody thing won't send. Why? Because it's out of paper and they haven't changed it yet, because faxes are really passe, and they've got loads of different 'communications tools', to use the irritating pseudo-american sales patter of the chap who sold them.
In desperation you call the cellphone, they're bound to be in a restaurant with a load of other chinless wonders guffawing down the blower and putting everyone off their food. But surprise, surprise it rings and rings and then takes you back to the effing voicemail on their desk which tells you that they've gone home for the day, so they were there all along, but didn't answer the call.
So you hit # again to get reception maybe you can catch them on the way out, but the security guard's on walk about (skiving) and you get the stylophone version of Tie a bloody yellow ribbon round the old oak tree, with a digitised American voice, which sounds like it's trying to keep last nights curry down, saying ner-ner-ner-ner-ner.
What do you do? Why, you smash the phone up and start effing and blinding till you feel better.
This might sound far fetched but it happens all the time. In much the same way that radioactive material has a half life and therefore in theory never stops being radioactive, those who pile up loads and loads of emails, voicemails, cellular phones, faxes and pagers in the belief that it will make them more contactable will remain precisely as contactable as they were before.
It's basically your fault, you meet the FD or the IT director and sell them all this stuff that will increase productivity and reduce customer complaints and forget the simple fact that you'll rely on lazy and badly trained people to use it all. If you put a nappy on a pig it doesn't mean it will ever learn how to use a potty, you're just wasting good nappies.
People have to be trained to be productive before you give them aids to make them more productive. Ask any mathematician, multiply a negative and a positive and you get a negative. Two positives, on the other hand, is a different story.