By Jim Hagarty
Email is the most destructive influence in human relations since the invention of the handgun.
A fairly bold statement I understand but I am good and sick of my inbox, my drafts folder, my trash, my junk mail. I hate it all.
It’s a love affair gone bad. Really bad. In 1994 when I got my first address, which I still use, I couldn’t wait to run downstairs every night after supper to see what crazy jokes people had sent me and to prepare a few zingers of my own to distribute. It was so nice to be connected again to family and friends long neglected.
But even then, I began to have a feeling something wasn’t quite natural. I was writing long happy notes to people I wouldn’t say hi to on the street and, in fact, would duck into doorways to avoid. And I was continually blathering on as though I was the happiest guy on earth without a care in the world. In other words, I was as phony as the 18-year-old blonde model who just emailed me an invitation to be her pal. I don’t think she really wants to be my pal.
Twenty-two years and many thousands of messages sent and received later, I’m an electronic wreck. Email, it turns out, just exacerbates your character flaws, weaknesses and insecurities and plays russian roulette every day with your friendships.
Last night, for example, I went to bed feeling very blue. I had not received an email all day from someone who emails me daily, sometimes several times a day. Why the sudden lapse? Obviously, there could be only one explanation. I had said something wrong in my most recent email sent in her direction and smashed some feelings in the process. Probably lost a friend for good.
But there, this morning, was the long lost message and all was right with the world again. But for how long?
Last week, it was another friend and the several hundred words which zipped back and forth over the cyber lines between us escalated into a literary war which kicked the living crap out of what had been a pretty good relationship.
The trouble began when I impulsively emailed off a message which I immediately realized I shouldn’t have sent. Then the long, long wait by the monitor to see a reply. When it came it consisted of three words. That would have been fine except the writer normally couldn’t say hello without using at least half a Webster’s dictionary. So, he was mad. And a subsequent email proved me right: he was spittin’ mad. The words came flying off my screen like shrapnel. A bulletproof vest and hockey helmet with facemask would have been good precautionary apparel for me.
So, the battle was on. Of course, no reply for more than 24 hours from me was a tactical move – a way to wear down the opponent through neglect. Then my response: 4,000 words, only about six of which were, on reflection, suitable to be sent. The sound of a dying friendship could be heard all the way to Jupiter and back. A volley of messages, each a bigger club than the one used before until both egos were bruised and battered and a relationship torn and tattered.
And why? Next to both his and my computer are telephones. In a million years, no such acrimonious battle would have ever developed had we chatted instead of keyboarded.
When VCRs first surfaced, users taped everything they could, and stacked their shelves with unwatched cassettes. A new phrase was coined: video guilt. We rearranged our evenings just to try to catch up on the shows we needed to watch from the nights and weeks before.
Now there is email guilt. Messages sitting for days unopened. Others opened but never replied to. Still others answered with no answer returned for your message sent. Why the inbox no show? Another person peeved? More battles awaiting?
I met a woman a while back whom I was impressing, I thought, with the carefully dropped mention that there are six computers in our household of four people. Far from seeing me as one of the more enlightened guys she’d ever met, she had some astonishing news of her own, which overshadowed my hard-drive count.
“We’ve gotten rid of all our computers,” she said with a smile. “They were wrecking our lives.”
The truth is, they’re doing a number on my family’s lives too, and the nicest evening we spent all winter was one Wednesday when the power went out for a few hours.
I went home and wrote up a bit of a snarky message to the woman with no computers.
But it died on the screen.
I had nowhere to send it.
Surely Bob Dylan had something like this in mind when he wrote I Shall Be Released.
For every foot forward email has helped us take, it’s forced us to take two steps back.
Giant steps.
Email sucks.
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