Which brings me back to my bright idea. Let me digress for a second
to say that I know better.
More often than not, no good comes from a bright idea. Take, for
example, the dishwasher. Whose bright idea was that? You have to
wash the dishes before you put them in. Rinse, you say? Yeah.
Right. You can have the fork with the splotchy, crusty thing on it.
The bright idea was to sell everybody on the notion that these
things are convenient.
People with bright ideas inevitably say that they only want to make
things better or easier. No, they don't. They want recognition as
the sort of person who has bright ideas. They also want the money
that comes from people who buy their bright ideas.
As proof, I offer this: As anyone who owns a computer knows, the
worst thing you can do is to try to make things better or easier.
Because then you hear something like this:
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEYAZABAZA … HUH? …
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAIIIIEEEEEE …
NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! OH. OHH. OOOOOOHHHHHHHHH. NOOOOO! JESSICA!!!
JESSICA!!!! NO! AWWW
WWW. (Deep breath.
Deep breath. Deep breath.) @#$*$%%#@*%!!! OH. Oh, no.
(Whimper.)
And that is exactly the sound that came wailing out of my home
office on the morning I had the bright idea to establish
autoreply. What happened is, in technical jargon, it didn't work.
In fact, things went so awry that you might say - and, again,
forgive the lapse into technical computerese - all heck broke
loose.
I went to the Scrollbar or Toolshed or whatever they call that
thing up there with all the hieroglyphics, clicked on Mail, and
chose something called Automatic. A window came up. It said
something about Preferences, yada yada.
What. Ever.
My preference was for autoreply, and Automatic seemed to me the
likely way to do that.