What did we used to do in the days before E-mail, and by golly, can we please go back?
Yes, I’m asking you sweet world to take this evil device for conveying messages and flush it down the great mystical commode from whence it came.
You heard me correctly. Even a son of technology, a child raised on the microchip, reared on the digital, trained on the mouse, married to the great World Wide Web has said it.
Take it away!
I’m done with it. I’m carpal tunneled out, my poor hands crippled.
Sure, E-mail can be a wonderful thing. But it’s also an undeniable scourge. A creeping virus. An addiction. The equivalent of electronic kudzu, spreading, growing, infecting, overwhelming, suffocating, driving me mad. If my office door is ever closed, it’s because I’m in there working like a fiend, typing like a mad man, trying desperately to reduce my electronic pile to something manageable.
“A-Ha!” I emerge triumphantly 18 hours later, my fingers gnarled-up, twisted and twitching. “I’ve reduced my inbox from 32,000 messages to a much more manageable 31,892. I now have a date with 17 martinis.”
I return and they’re back.
That’s why I’m proposing an E-mail-out Day, a great blackout for E-mail when we all swear an oath — as a nation and a world — to silence the E-mail airwaves for one day. We will all recover and drink beer in harmony, and not a soul will click send.
Just a little relief is all I ask. Get behind me on this, people.
Where did all these messages come from? In the olden days I never got this many phone calls or letters. So who are all these people contacting me now?
Many are work-related. Others are jokes, personal messages and offers for me to go to beautiful Nigeria and help a poor dethroned prince clean $320 million in US dollars, of which I will be able to keep my share. Then there’s my friend Damon who lives in Philadelphia and sends me a new photo EVERYDAY of his beloved, adopted city. Thanks, Damon.
It’s getting so bad I’m considering setting up automatic replies that will send messages like you get on customer service phone lines: “Thank you for contacting Brian Thompson. Unfortunately, all of his operators are busy and he’s currently trying to pretend you and your problems don’t exist. While your message is important to him, let’s not fool ourselves, it’s really not. Current response time is approximately 18 weeks. Please hold and the next available service representative will ignore you shortly.”
Everyone’s facing it. Type in “E-mail” and “overload” in Yahoo and there are dozens and dozens of hits, from a leadership seminar on mastering E-mail by a guy named Stever Robbins to something about E-mail overload in Congress (poor babies!) and a 1998 CNN piece titled, “E-mail overload drives users bananas.”
You mean we’ve know about this problem for more than 7 years and no one has done anything about it? Congress obviously knows. Why haven’t they passed legislation!
I clicked on Mr. Robbins’ link and found an article so interesting, and frankly helpful, that (I can’t believe I actually did this) I E-mailed it to people! My God, what have I done? But seriously, if you’re having problems like me, this guy is worth checking out. (His best advice, truly: Charge people for sending you E-mail. I love it!)
I’m taking a trip soon, and at first I thought I would take a laptop so I could check my e-mail while away. But you know what? It might be time to take a little break from it. Put the out-of-office assistant on (“Brian Thompson is currently in a mental asylum trying to work out some deep-rooted E-mail issues caused by you!”) and forget Sir Isaac Johansen Email ever invented this awful scourge.
If you really need to contact me, send a carrier pigeon.