IT’S MIDNIGHT. I’ve just gotten home after 12 hours away from a computer, and before going to bed I trudge to the desktop to check my e-mail. As I watch, the little number in parentheses next to the word “Inbox” in my Outlook Express program begins to roll upwards like the point counter on a pinball machine.
I have 121 unread e-mails.
I let out a groan of distress that causes my wife to call to me and ask what on earth is wrong. How can I possibly handle 121 e-mails at midnight? And yet, if I don’t deal with them, by morning there will be another 75 on top of those! Will it never end?
Almost everybody I know complains about excessive amounts of e-mail. I don’t buy these complaints for a moment. They are the newest manifestation of the peculiarly American habit of complaining about how busy you are.
Remember the 1990s? Man, were we all busy. Too busy to take 45 minutes for lunch, too busy to go to the gym, too busy to do much of anything except work and talk about how busy we were. We had to get to the airport to fly to a meeting. We had a conference on the 15th, an executive retreat on the 17th, and Billy’s soccer championship on the 19th.
Oh, it was all just so exhausting.
The weariness with which we discussed our busy-ness in the 1990s was a bluff. It was a not-so-subtle way of saying we were in demand. Or that we were important. Or that we were making fortunes. We were strutting like peacocks, and being busy was our plumage.
Now here we are, smack-dab in the middle of the ’00s, and we’re not so busy any longer. Or, rather, it’s no longer considered acceptable to brag about being busy. After all, we’ve been in an economic slowdown for some time, and we all know people who lost boom-time jobs. Are we going to brag to them about how busy we are? Of course not. They’d strangle us with our laptop cords.
So instead, we whine about our e-mail burden. But come on. It’s really no burden. We can’t help equating an overstuffed e-mail inbox with a third-grade locker on February 14 that’s filled to the top with valentines.
Some valentines. Here’s what I know about my 121 unread e-mails: More than 100 are unwanted, unneeded, and will go unread. Of those orphans, at least 25 will be unsolicited offers of sexual favors. The language that appears in the “Subject” line of the dirty e-mails is shocking even to me, and I once lived in the middle of pre-Giuliani Times Square on a block that seemed to be the center of the transvestite-prostitute trade in New York. And the photographs? Words fail me.
I could never understand how it was that I became the recipient of so many dirty missives, until somebody explained that it comes from having my e-mail address appear regularly on the web (at the tag end of my newspaper pieces). There are programs that automatically search out any and every such public address, add it to a never-ending mailing list, and bingo! It’s porn on the hour.
Also I am regularly offered Viagra, Rogaine, weight-control pills, and antidepressants at low cost. Yes, my own e-mail is essentially accusing me of being impotent, bald, fat, and suicidal. And yet I am happy that it’s clogging my inbox.
I now also receive, on a daily basis, e-mails from innumerable relatives of innumerable deposed or dead African potentates. Evidently, these sadly departed or exiled leaders all have tens of millions of dollars in bank accounts. Their relatives inform me that some evildoers want to seize that money.
The relatives ask sheepishly if perhaps they could wire those millions into my bank account for a few days to hide them. Once the evildoers go looking elsewhere, Deposed-Guy Relative will take the money back. For my troubles, I will receive a huge commission. All I have to do is forward my bank account number and the routing number off my checks.
Of course, if I were to do that, I would find my bank account emptied in a matter of minutes–because, let’s face it, you can’t ever trust a deposed African potentate whose relatives know how to use e-mail.
Last year, according to Wired news, 2,600 Americans fell for this scam and found themselves bilked out of $345,000.
But somewhere in the midst of the corruption, greed, and lasciviousness, there’s a long missive from my niece in London. A delighted answer by a writer to a fan e-mail I sent him about a piece he wrote. An actual photograph of a baby sleeping atop a sleeping golden retriever.
These are the nuggets of gold for which we all must pan through the slime and dirt of our electronic inboxes. And they’re worth it.
–John Podhoretz
