Mailbox Full; Mind Empty

When I was a kid, my mother brought home a book by David Macaulay called "Motel of the Mysteries." It was a takeoff on the excavation of Tut's tomb, but set in the future some years after our present culture was buried alive by the simultaneous collapse of airborne pollution and millions of pieces of junk mail in transit. Macaulay, for all his brilliance as an architectural illustrator, storyteller, and educator, was close but just off the mark in anticipating the worldwide catastrophe that threatens us even now: being buried under mounds and mounds of email. And we're not talking about the printed hard copies here or even the backup discs. Just the invisible, weightless bits and bytes that take over our once-productive lives. There has to be some measurable weight to my Yahoo! home page, though, which swells importantly as it delivers the statistic: "Inbox 12,911 messages." This is not even counting items that were deleted or dumped in my spam folder. Luckily for me, Yahoo stopped limiting message storage space a few years ago. I think it's one of the very few examples of a corporation actually acting out of pity for the consumer.

A couple of weeks ago, as my computer was recovering from a series of crashes, I started looking around for ways to free up memory and drive space. I had been able to keep the Outlook inbox under 2000 messages, but after last year's tours, it had ballooned up to almost 2500. Somehow my eyes locked onto the screen and I sat down and started reading, replying, filing, deleting. My eyes turned red as tabasco. Two little gray cones of my dead brain cells piled up on my shoulders, and a croupier mysteriously showed up to brush them off. I didn't take any notice, I just kept typing. Finally, after 6 hours, I looked up. Way up, as I had shrunk 3 inches when my neck went from vertical to horizontal. The inbox now held only 1605 messages. Wow! Amazing. May as well get it down to an even 1600, or just a few below to make room for the incoming batch. Another hour or two went by, and it was down to 1423. Gee, I should just get it down to 1400 and call it a day. Dinnertime came and went. At last I gave up the chase. But I had gotten the total down to just under 1200 messages. That was the first of several marathons. I've stayed up all night. I've used every color of flag provided by Microsoft Outlook. I've created several dozen folders and subfolders. I've answered emails that were 2 or even 3 years old. I've apologized profusely in at least 5 languages. And these are well-thought-out replies, too, not some all-upper case or all lower case Blackberry cuneiform, like "ok thx". I'm neurotic and picky and I actually think about how I sign an email. "'Sincerely' sounds nice, but on second thought doesn't that seem a little insincere? I'll type 'Best regards' instead. I can back that up. Or maybe 'warm regards.' No, too much. stick with 'Best.'" It's as if I think there's a Nobel Prize out there for email.

As of this writing, there are only 326 emails in my inbox. Oh crap, 330. 339. And almost all of these are awaiting a reply. Paul came upstairs and stood behind me watching the wisps of smoke rising from my ears. He suggested that I set up an automatic reply telling people to try back if they don't hear from us within 3 weeks. How could such a simple, ingenious idea come from someone who can only use our expensive laptop to get boxing news and spyware? Maybe his intelligence has been preserved by his computer illiteracy. I read in the paper that email lowers your I.Q. (okay, it was the comics page, but there's probably more truth there than in the national news section). Could that be true? What about the freedom we were supposed to gain with these labor-saving devices in our paperless officies? And where are those hovercrafts and streaming holograms we were promised in the disco age? They were supposed to have been perfected by now. The way things are going, we won't even have the social security income to buy them if they ever do come out.

I'm convinced that someday people will see us the way we see depictions of people in Victorian times: caught up in email and Google searches just as our forebears were caught up in dusting, washing and feeding chickens. The humans and nonhumans of the future will long for our open spaces, our sense of beauty and history, but they will enjoy conveniences we can only dream of. Of course it follows that their labor-saving devices will probably create inconveniences and demands on their time that we would even never want to imagine.
Feel free to add your comments! Don't be too surprised if I don't write back immediately.
ok thx
ar