Email rules and regulations
In 1897 Sir Joseph John Thompson discovered the electron. A hundred years and four thousand nifty gizmos later, we found a way to use it to sell porn.
In the past few years, we have all but replaced the venerable Postal Service with electronic mail. And why not? It’s fast, it’s cheap, it’s practical, it offers anonymity, and it gives us the opportunity to attach to ourselves a stupid name like “spamlover456″ or “mostmuscular13.”
I like e-mail. I don’t have to run home to check it, I rarely have to wait for it, and I never get an e-mail that’s been run over by a postal wagon. I can store it without taking up space if it’s nice, or it’s gone with the press of a button if it’s not (Though it does lack the certain satisfaction that comes with ripping paper). It doesn’t clutter, and there’s little chance of somebody reading it without my knowledge.
But if we’re going to make a go of this e-mail thing, we’ve got to lay down some ground rules.
Settle on an address – Common sense tells us that we can’t move house every three days and expect our friends to know where to send our mail. But for some reason, this particular logic falls apart in front of a keyboard.
What is it about e-mail that makes people so itchy to change their address?
I get e-mails constantly: “I’ve got a new e-mail address! Don’t e-mail me at coitalbuy@somedomain.com anymore; now my address is hamsterchunks@someotherdomain.com.”Why?!
People should, for the sake of everyone’s sanity, pick one simple e-mail address that people can easily remember. I recommend using your name. People know you by it, so it’s easy to remember, and no matter how bad your name is, it can’t possibly be less dignified than “boogiecat” or whatever ridiculous concoction you come up with on your own.
If you must go with some made-up name, I like “crackfiend.” And be sure to put it on your next job application.
Yelling – You know what’s really annoying! Putting an exclamation point after every sentence! Yeah, it sucks! BUT IT’S NOT NEARLY AS BAD AS CAPITALIZING EVERYTHING. THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO SHOULD WRITE IN ALL CAPS ARE ARCHITECTS AND 5-YEAR-OLDS.
Format – There’s a proper, accepted format to e-mail. Observe it.We don’t do indentions in e-mail. They work on paper, but on the screen, it’s different. On the screen even 250 words of text in a big block looks like a Homer epic.
E-mail paragraphs should be short, sweet, and separated by at least one blank line. I have the attention span of a six-year-old and I get nearly 70 e-mails a day. The only way I can wade through them all is if each author drags me through his or her message with the cunning use of paragraph spacing.
Grammar – For some reason, in e-mail and chat, English ceases to be a recognizable language and becomes instead a clever combination of numbers, symbols and acronyms: “BTW, b4 we went 2 the movies, we 8 @ Mc’s. LOL, BRB.”
Even typing as slow as 30 wpm, the difference between “to” and “2″ is less than half a second, and it helps me not to feel like my e-mail is somehow security encrypted.
Spam – No, I don’t care about this great deal you found. No, I don’t care that you’ll get a $5 bonus for signing me up. No, I don’t care that this special offer will save me $$$ (another clever way to avoid typing the extra two letters needed to spell “money.”) I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care. I get enough spam from people I’ve never heard of; I don’t need any from my friends.
Smiley Faces – He that knows, tell me: how do you create a homicidal expression using a colon and some other punctuation? I’d like to use it to respond to some of the punctuation-mark smiley faces and pictures I get.
Or maybe I’d be best off with this response: (_|_)
What disturbs me is that people have the time to sit around and think these things up. No wonder America collectively suffers from lack of exercise and overuse of welfare programs: instead of bicycling or working, we’re all sitting around typing up faces or pictures of Winnie-the-Pooh. Perhaps someday the National Endowment for the Arts will fund an exposition of text-based artwork. Until then, keep it, ’cause I don’t want it.
Chain letters – The fact that chain letters continue to circulate is much more disturbing evidence of education shortcomings than our SAT test scores.
I personally guarantee that if you don’t send your latest chain letter to 183 of your closest friends, nothing will happen. You will not be sodomized by a mountain goat, eaten by Holland lop buies, or infected with oral gonorrhea. Nothing will happen.
On the other hand, if you do send it, you will not get $1000 from Bill Gates, or a 1.5″ increase in penile size. All you will get are a bunch of annoyed friends and a place of honor on sucker lists.
So pass that message along to 15 people in the next five minutes, and make a wish.
