 Youve Got Mail. Or Do You?
By Jim Shahin
It has taken a while, but I have finally answered this age-old question: How do you get the last word when you and the other person are not on speaking terms?
The answer: Use e-mail.
A few weeks back, an e-mail message all but exploded in my inbox. After berating me for crimes against humanity in general and against children in particular, the author concluded by scolding me as if I were a 10-year-old and she were my mother.
“Please,” she thundered, “don’t make this practice a part of your future behavior!”
What? I thought, fury rising like steam inside me (which is not a comfortable sensation, by the way). Practice? What practice? And ‘don’t make it part of my future behavior’? What the … who are you to tell me … I … you … braaaaah!
And then I read the kicker sentence: “We need to be role models for our children.”
Well, my steaming indignation boiled over. Which, as you know, is not pretty.
What are you supposed to say when someone invokes “the children”? “I don’t care about children”? No. Of course not. You have to say something like, “Oh yeah, well, I am a better role model than you are, nanny nanny, boo boo.”
Which is basically what I said in my e-mail reply.
With that, we were officially off track, assuming, of course, there was ever a track in the first place.
She fired back an e-mail, a sharp retort along the lines of, “Oh yeah? OH YEAH??? Well, you’re just a pinhead.”
And I blasted her right back, with something like, “Me, a pinhead? You’re the pinhead. And you know what? You can send me another e-mail, but I am not going to read it.”
That last part, about not reading the e-mail — I really did send that.
And that’s when things got interesting.
She replied.
I did not reply to her reply. Instead, I wrote an entirely new message. It reiterated that she could send all the e-mails she wanted, but I wasn’t going to read any more on this subject.
She sent another.
I did not read it.
And, again, I wrote a new e-mail to say that I didn’t read it.
She replied.
I wrote yet another new e-mail. It said, more cleverly this time (it invoked Abe Lincoln), that, again, I had not read her reply, and that I would not.
She replied again.
I wrote again. This one said that “all good things must come to an end. And so I will say that you are welcome to keep that fan mail coming in, but not only will I not read it, I won’t even respond.” Its subject header was “and … adieu.”
Within minutes, my in-box received “RE: and … adieu.”
As with the others, I did not open it, and I did not read it.
And it was killing me.
I was dying to know what she had written in those e-mails. But it was a matter of honor that I had not read them. I said I wouldn’t, and I didn’t.
It was the cyber equivalent of hanging up the phone on somebody.
But by e-mailing me after I e-mailed her, she got the last word.
True, I didn’t read it.
But now I am left trying to answer another age-old question: If your computer intones “You’ve got mail” but nobody reads it, was it ever really received?
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