Avalanche of e-mails keeps on growing

Written by Joe Pisani
Monday, 09 November 2009 19:31

While I was waiting in line at the information desk of Barnes and Noble, a clerk told the woman in front of me, “I’ll contact you when the book comes in. What’s your e-mail address?”

There was a moment’s pause before she responded, “I don’t have an e-mail address.”

The young man looked up quizzically. This was like telling the mothers in the carpool, “I don’t have a driver’s license.” It was totally out of the ordinary in the post-modern technological era when people put their whole lives, including their police records and sexual preferences, on Facebook for the entire world to see.

To confirm this eccentricity, the woman, who looked about 40-something, shook her head “no.”

How, I wondered, can a person survive without e-mail? It’s worse than not having a clothes dryer or flat-screen TV or flushing toilet. Doesn’t she believe in the need to “social network”?

However, I couldn’t curb my enthusiasm for this cyber-age Thoreau and immediately chimed in, “You’re my idol.”

“I just never got around to it,” she confessed.

For years, I’ve complained about e-mail, Pam, e-blasts and all the other modern marvels that obsess us, but despite my chronic grumbling, I became addicted, which means to say I constantly check my Blackberry — during Mass, upon entering the shower, upon exiting the shower and on various other equally bizarre and inappropriate occasions.

Every day I’m buried beneath an avalanche of several hundred e-mails. Regrettably, I don’t answer the ones I should until days later because I’m too busy deleting everything else, especially those annoying e-mail discussions that people get into when there’s a minor problem at work or at home, which generates an unending number of responses even though nothing gets resolved.

While the amount of e-mail we shuffle around has increased a hundredfold, I’m convinced the amount of work we accomplish has decreased.

We all know people who feel compelled to send every poem, every cute puppy or baby picture, every inspirational story, every prophecy about the end of the world, and every rumor of scandal to their godparents and grandparents and former lovers.

Even worse, some of us have to get the last word and won’t stop e-mailing until we do. The situation is so bad, our elected officials in Congress hide their e-mail addresses to avoid getting spammed.

But in a perverse way, I love e-mail because it makes me feel special … it makes me feel wanted. There’s nothing better than waking up, checking my e-mail and discovering those wonderful people at Ocean State Job Lots sent me their latest coupon or learning the men’s store is having a buy one suit and get two free sale or that the bookstore is offering a special coupon for 30 percent off or that LL Bean is cutting the price of hiking boots in half or that Dr. Ogami Baracuda in Nigeria urgently needs to transfer $18.5 million to my bank account.

These are wonderful experiences I didn’t have until e-mail was invented.