There is a local figure whom I will not name who publishes a weekly column with the above title. It's become a bit of a joke between me and my wife to use it when we communicate something fairly trivial to each other. In that spirit, I am sharing with the world the fact that after years of struggle I have achieved one of my dreams: I have stopped all notification of incoming email in Outlook 2000 while still allowing it to check automatically for new mail. I had long ago turned off the sounds and dialogs, but couldn't get rid of the little envelope in the space on the Windows task bar officially known as the "notification area."
The matter became urgent a few weeks ago when, after a lengthy period of evasion, I was finally cornered and forced to start using XP and Exchange. This took away my ability to specify the interval between checks for new messages and caused Outlook to notify me whenever (I assume) a message arrives at the Exchange server. Since I get email pretty frequently in my job, the result was that I couldn't concentrate because I am incapable of ignoring that notification; it's like a ringing phone that won't stop until I pick it up. When the little envelope appears, I can't continue what I'm doing until I've looked to see what just arrived and then opened a message, any message, and made the envelope go away.
I'm sure I will be more productive now, eventually making up for the hours I spent solving this problem.
Sometimes I'm afraid that I will turn into Wally.
Pre-TypePad
Light On Dark Water 
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