A friend sent 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. But many of us take this quirk of a character flaw into account and stack it up against his many better qualities.
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.
The distance between the brain and the computer screen is simply not far enough for some opinionated souls. In the old days, we were told to write the letter but wait one day before sending it. Most of the time, we would end up ripping it up.
Emails, it seems, are not so easy to shred. Common sense is a wonderful commodity but sometimes it just can’t keep up with the pace of change.
©2012 Jim Hagarty
