There is no doubt that email has revolutionised communication. Can any of us really remember our world without it? [Gingerly raises her hand.]
I must admit that I do miss getting actual correspondence and cards through the post. It used to be so exciting to receive a letter from family and friends across the seas. Now it’s all flyers, bills, and pension updates that constantly remind me I’ll be working into my 80s.
However, all the nostalgia for ‘snail mail’ aside, someone as impatient as myself truly appreciates the speediness of email. The only time that swiftness of delivery backfires, of course, is when we hit ‘Send’ by mistake, or after writing a Very Honest Email fuelled by tequila.
I cannot be the only one who has felt the cold grip of terror around my heart under such circumstances.
In my young years at an office job, our boss sent out what I perceived to be a ridiculous list of rules for staff to follow. There was a terrific team of coworkers there – many with very good senses of humour – and we often exchanged emails. So, I took it upon myself to create a mock version of said regulations (I may have mentioned ‘Thou shalt ride only an elephant or penny-farthing to work’) and emailed it to a bunch of my worker friends.
Revelling in my own hilarity, I walked around desks 10 minutes later with a “hey-did-ya-read-it-yet?” glint in my eye. Some were laughing, but the majority response was, “Wow. That was brave!”
Brave how? Brave what?
Turned out that instead of me sending my potentially job-terminating missive to one of my friends on the list, I’d emailed it to the senior manager of another department in the building who had the same first name. It also didn’t help that he was good friends with my boss.
I felt all the blood freezing in my veins. What could I do? Hack the server? How did one do that? Could I pull the fire alarm and get everyone out of the building, then run to that manager’s office and hopefully delete the email from existence? Panic never gives you good solutions, so I controlled my breathing and figured the only thing to do was head immediately to the office of the mistaken recipient and lay my cards on the table.
As I ran in his door, slightly red-cheeked, he looked up from his CRT screen. Had he read it yet? Was there still time to fix this somehow? (“Look! Over there! A flying plant pot!” [Delete, delete, delete… ])
I hadn’t even opened my mouth, or calculated the weight of his computer and the distance between it and the window, before he grinned and said, “I assume this is about the email?”
Ugh. I, Vicki Wheaton, accept that my termination from this position is just and appropriate…
It could have gone down that way, but it didn’t. He was very kind about it, and actually chuckled a little… in between reminders that perhaps my time would be better spent elsewhere, and let this be a lesson to me for the future about thinking twice before hitting the ‘Send’ button. I slunk out of there, grateful for the second chance and vowing to never ever make the same mistake again. And, in fairness, I think it was at least three years before I got myself into another pickle.
Now, in the heady days of text messages and WhatsApp, there are many ways to swiftly get the word out. WhatsApp can be even more dangerous than emails, in that we mostly have our phones stapled to ourselves wherever we go. At any time of day or night, something could pop into our heads and we simply must type it out, for better or worse, peppered with a goodly helping of emojis. Everyone knows there is no better time to reignite an argument via text than at 3am after indulging too much in the devil drink. Has no one yet created the genius prototype for a phone breathalyser? Where every hour, you’d have to blow into it, and if you were over the limit, the keypad, voice recognition, and all means of communication – save calling emergency numbers – would be locked? They could call it Digniti or something.
At least WhatsApp allows you to delete a message if you realise you’ve sent it in error – you’ve just got to get to it before the recipient does. I also hadn’t noticed until recently that my iPhone’s mail app will allow me a number of seconds to ‘unsend’ an email before it’s gone. I wonder if that senior manager from yesteryear invented that feature…
Yes, technology is amazing, but there’s only so much it can do to prevent you from sending out a rant in the heat of the moment if you’re hell-bent on doing so. That’s when you realise that snail mail wasn’t so bad after all. By the time you’d written everything down in longhand; gone to find an envelope; then where-the-heck-did-I-put-all-those-stamps? – never mind heading out to the post office – you’d have cooled off and not mailed it. What are the odds of us returning to those times? None.
‘Digniti’ by Wheaton Corp – patent pending.
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