Too Effin Close for Comfort

By Jim Hagarty
2012

A friend send me a bit of a nasty email. He has a bad habit of doing this. Almost every time he hits “send”, his list of real-life friends gets a little shorter. I hang in there, but it isn’t easy.

I replied to this latest email very carefully, as I always try to do, in order to avoid the mountain-molehill phenomenon. I kept writing, then backing up and erasing and starting again, to choose better wording. At one point, a part of one of my sentences read, “…if you want to…” I erased that line and wrote something else. But maybe I didn’t get rid of it all. Just before I hit send on my reply, I notice some stray letters at the very start of the message, right at the top. They were: “f you”. They were left over from “if you want to.”

A Freudian slip? My true feelings? I don’t know, but I broke out in a sweat, deleted the f you and sent the message.

Maybe I should have left those four tiny letters in. Or maybe I’ll use them in my reply to the next nasty message which I know will be coming soon. The worst thing that ever happened to my friend was the invention of email. Seriously. Worst thing. Ever. And I am not effin’ kidding.

Author: Jim Hagarty

I am a 72-year-old retired journalist, busy recovering from a lifelong career as an unretired journalist. This year marks a half century of my scratching out little fables about life. My interests include genealogy, humour and music. I live in a little blue shack in Canada and spend most of my time trying to stay out of trouble. I am not that good at it. I also spent years teaching journalism. Poor state of journalism today: My fault. I have a family I don't deserve, a dog that adores me, and two cars the junk yard refuses to accept. My prized possessions include my old guitar and a razor my Dad gave me when I was 14 and which I still use when I bother to shave. Oh, and my great-great-grandfather's blackthorn stick he brought from Ireland in the 1850s. I have only one opinion but it is a good one: People take too many showers.