Email is an amazing thing.
I remember when I first discovered email. Fall. 1993. My college friend Sara and I would race back to the dorm after lunch in the cafeteria, settle into a few uncomfy chairs in the building’s Mac lab (Mac in a Box — remember those?!), and log into our UNIX accounts. A little tingle when “You have new mail” would appear after the UNIX prompt; gallon waves of disaapointment when we read “You have mail” instead (there is a differenence). First Elm. Then Pine (”Pine Is Not Elm”). Then neither of us used either and we checked email with the fancy Eudora or Outlook or Netscape instead. No matter the mehod: those were the days when the emails I received were kind words from mom whose mundane news from home was the best thing that often happened in a day.
For a while now, I’ve found that email is much easier than the phone. I’m a better writer than I am top-of-the-head speaker. Email gives me time to prepare, think, and choose my words carefully; the phone gives me the opportunity to practice “ums” and “ahs” … and the phrase “is there a reason you called?”
Maybe though, for others, the phone remains the better mechanism for communicating. They would be better off saying things to me rather than writing them, because, five bucks down, they’d never say it in the first place if they realized what they were writing. Tell me: do you people think when you send me emails like you did today? Do you realize that I’m a person, not just an email address? And what would you do if I picked up the phone, called you right this second, and said “I’d like to discuss the email you sent me today”?
Mom, send me an email with good news from home. Tell me Grandma is well. Tell me dad went to the dentist and is for once happy about his teeth. Tell me it’s parent teacher conference time and you’ve been at work a lot, but that when you got home last night you made chicken and potatoes and that you got a really good “do” on that last batch of chocolate chip cookies.
And you — you know who you are — send me an email that doesn’t criticize my work, because, even though I shouldn’t take it personally, my work is an extension of me. And you know what? I’ll be calling you.
Eric has moved into new digs (only online; the real move won’t happen til spring). Hopefully the lame designer he hired (uh, that would be me) got everything to work in both IE and Netscape. Check out the fresh look!Another dot-com disaster. It’s really bad when only two days after you place an order from an online store, it goes belly-up. Bye bye, lucy.com. For me? I’m sticking with the web in education. We’ll be around a lot longer than some of these folks are.
Leave a comment: