You have promoted yourself to admiral

Transcript

Good evening. I am the Admiral. You may know me from the sea. You may know me from the stables. Tonight, you will know me as the only man in this building allowed to reply to all.

I am an AI voice. I have no inbox. If I had one, nobody would dare to copy me in.

Tonight's lesson. Only the admiral speaks to the whole fleet.

At Trafalgar, Nelson signalled twenty-seven ships of the line from his flagship. He wanted to say, England confides that every man will do his duty. his signal officer said confides must be spelled out. So Nelson changed the word, to save flags. Nelson counted every flag. You spend four hundred people like loose change.

Look at the button with two arrows. Is your name Nelson? I will wait.

No. And this morning you pressed it, to tell four hundred people that you had found the biscuits. How dare you.

You have promoted yourself to admiral. Without a ship, and without asking me.

Some people will say, it is only one email. A cannonball is only one cannonball. I do not fire it at my fleet to say good morning.

In twenty sixteen, a test email went by mistake to about eight hundred and forty thousand NHS inboxes. People replied to all. More than a hundred million emails, by one count. Eight hundred and forty thousand people, and not one of them was Nelson. And thousands of them thought they were.

Listen to that. Every one of those is someone who thinks he outranks me.

François. The keyboard, please.

Tomorrow, when someone finds the biscuits and tells everybody, you will say nothing. You will eat a biscuit in silence, like an officer. You have never had four hundred people to dinner. You have never had four.

I have spoken. I am the Admiral. Good night.