Tuck away your Hawaiian shirts and wacky ties. In many workplaces, “Casual Fridays” are becoming “E-Mail-Free Fridays.”

According to a recent article in USA Today, many professionals are encouraging phone or face-to-face meetings by prompting employees to forgo e-mail for a day. Some are even deleting their entire inbox and declaring “e-mail bankruptcy.”

The push to tame overflowing inboxes stems from the “e-mail overload” which is faced by many Americans. According to the article, approximately 39.7 billion e-mails are sent worldwide each day, and white-collar workers receive about 140 messages daily.

Although college students might not be bombarded by that many messages, a mail check never fails to produce an obnoxious e-mail from a professor alerting you to a recently concocted homework assignment due in class the next day. God forbid, you don’t check your inbox every 10 minutes or go to bed before 3 a.m. You’ll be missing the assignment and all the points that go along with it.

An overload in e-mails also draws from those that are really important. When you get 20 messages a day from your career adviser, you get to the point where you don’t even read the subject line. Maybe you’re missing an important opportunity, but reading through 1,000 e-mails isn’t worth it.

For those few dire e-mails, we have to sort through the junk; unfortunately, there’s no way those filters can possibly catch every erectile dysfunction advertisement. According to australiaitnews.com, almost 1,000 spam messages are sent a second. Spam messages are up 20 percent from last year, which explains my entire junk folder.

Things have gone too far when I’m getting chain letters that promise to cause my demise if I don’t respond and e-mails asking me to buy shipments of illegal drugs. When it comes to unnecessary junk mail, I’m also sure we could all do without Penn State Newswire’s daily updates on new campus buildings. If I cared, I’d look it up myself. Even though these little campus alerts are annoying, I can deal with them. I know there are ways to “unsubscribe” from these services or block e-mails from certain sites, but as soon as I figure that out, another fantastic set of e-mails will be coming my way from somewhere else. Life is hard enough without the stress of constant e-mails.

One day without Webmail – or Angel, for that matter – would do us all a lot of good. Too many panic attacks have been caused by a crash of these servers. It’s unfair to expect students to submit all work online and rely on faulty methods to take huge exams. Scantron or old-fashioned, hand-graded exams are much more reliable. If my pencil breaks, I’m sure the kid behind me will have one I can borrow – but a computer freezing isn’t as reliable or a problem that’s as easily fixed.

Are we really so controlled by the Web that we don’t have time for personal interaction? Deleting entire inboxes is a great idea, but the repercussions will deter most people. The only way to relieve the stress of our “get-it-done-yesterday” world is to change our expectations about what’s possible on the Internet.

E-mail is great for shooting a “howdy” out to grandma or making a business deal in China, but we shouldn’t rely on it for everything. This is why I am officially filing for e-mail bankruptcy and declaring “E-Mail-Free Fridays” for myself. I’ll look forward to Saturday when I can get some great deals on heroin and erotic creams.