Golden age of e-mail

I remember the golden age of e-mail when all my younger cousins wandered upon the Internet at the same time. They live in towns of around five or six hundred people, so they generally have the same "group." I would venture to say that their address books at this time were pretty close to identical. I would get the same e-mail forward from each cousin (and I just have a truckload of cousins). Then their friends would forward the same forwards to me again. Then someone would “reply to all” would send me yet another e-mail. AFter the first dozen e-mails, I replied to one boy, a friend of a friend of a cousin I think, and told him about looking at the list of people who got the forward once already before he sent it out to all of us again. He wrote me something nasty that involved dirty emoticons and several @#$#@%’s. I just gave up.

My personal e-mail life has progressed. My cousins don’t e-mail me anymore. Probably because the friend of the friend of the cousin passed the word that I didn’t forward, so the 600 people in that town decided to stop e-mailing me. I may not get dozens of copies of the same lame forward, but I do get forwarded jokes where each line is preceded by a string of >>>’s. I can understand forwarding something mildly funny if it has the annoying > at the beginning of each line, but by the time it has three or four >’s, you need to seriously evaluate the funniness of the joke you are forwarding. If it isn’t funny enough for me to be in danger of peeing a little when I read it, remove some of those >’s before you send it over. I don’t want to waste my time unless it is pretty darn funny.

I’ve had e-mail at home long enough to evaluate what can be junked immediately without opening. If I don’t recognize the address, it is quick to be deleted. People know that if you send something from an address that others don’t know, you need to put something in the subject line that is going to alert the reader that you aren’t selling penis enhancement or prescription drugs, otherwise you will be trashed. I do get some tricky spam with subject lines like "Long time, no talk stranger." Or "John gave me your e-mail address" that make me curious enough to open. Very clever, Spammer, very clever.

Now, I am a certified member of the Real World. I work full time now, and I have been exposed to a whole new breed of annoying e-mailer. I won’t name names because I don’t want to write about work, but you know who they are…

The Pointless Emailer. This person sends you e-mails that just say “Thanks” or “No Problem” or even worse “np.” I wasted more time opening and deleting that e-mail than the person did writing it.

The Hit-And-Run Emailer. This person drops a bomb via e-mail, just moments before the end of the work day, and then promptly leaves. These e-mails are usually very breezy and upbeat, and they end with “Thanks!” (don’t forget the exclamation point). They also mean that I have another half an hour of work to do before I go home.

The Excited E-mailer. This person is on punctuation overload. A four-sentence e-mail may contain no less than 10 punctuation marks, five of which are exclamation points. These e-mails may also contain the words “Oops!” or “Wow!”, and they usually end with “Thanks!!” (don’t forget the exclamation points).

The Lazy-Question-Answerer. This person has no time to answer my e-mails, and instead of taking an extra 30 seconds to answer completely now, this person would rather I e-mail again for clarification. Last month, I sent an e-mail because I had gotten three different job titles for the same position: the Something-something supervisor, the Something-something coordinator, and the Something-something-else coordinator. “What is the correct title?” I asked via e-mail. “Coordinator,” was the response. Uh, thanks a lot Lazy-Question-Answerer. If I have more than one question in an e-mail, I bullet my questions. For some reason, people still don’t answer them all. I started numbering them, thinking that people might be more likely to answer them all – like a little Real World pop quiz. Nope, still doesn’t work.

The High-Priority E-mailer. This person believes that everything originating from his e-mail box is urgent. Whether it is about a nuclear meltdown in our building or his son’s concert this weekend, his e-mails will be marked with the red, read-me-now exclamation point. You know what? Sometimes it isn’t that important.

The Bad-Subject-Line E-mailer. This person titles each e-mail with a similar, ambiguous title. I stockpile work e-mail like it is a hot commodity, so when I’m trying to find something, and I have to sort through your e-mails titled, “Meeting stuff” and “Another issue,” you aren’t making my job any easier. It is called a “subject” line, so at least give me a hint.

Now, after all that, I’d like to add that I am a sucker for a good e-mail. I print them, read them over and over, ponder my replies, get my material ready for something equally amusing to send back to you. I laugh later over the funny parts. I get joy from seeing the e-mail address of a good e-mailer in my Inbox. I’ll even forgive some of the deadly sins of e-mailing if you send me a good one.

Oh yeah, you get extra points if there is danger of me peeing a little when I read it.