Colonel | Kurtz

Turns out — and this is the funny part — I was wrong. Automatic means that your computer does whatever it wants. Automatically. While you watch. Horrified.

A black bar scrolled across my computer, sending faster than the speed of light all the mail sitting in my Mail Waiting to Be Sent box. Those e-mails included furiously written diatribes against elected officials, angry notes to business associates, hurtful missives to friends, every deeply buried toxic thought that’s ever risen up from its bog to be articulated in a note that was never to be sent.

Until this moment.

I slammed Cancel. Nothing. Again: Cancel. Over and over and over: Cancel, Cancel, Cancel.

Finally, somehow, it stopped.

I sat staring, catatonic, at the screen. “The responses,” I muttered, channeling “the horror, the horror” of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. “The responses.”

I really hate bright ideas.