I remember when I was growing up, I’d hear my mom talk about how much she hated mail every day when it came in. I didn’t understand it. I loved getting mail. The mailbox was this little slice of awesome that sometimes delivered super exciting things to me. How could anyone hate that? Getting the mail was a high point of each day. A Charlie and the Chocolate Factory moment when you never knew what golden ticket might await you.
I still don’t hate mail. I don’t particularly look forward to it, but just because there’s rarely anything there to excite or terrify me.
But my inbox–that’s another story.
I hate my inbox for the same reason my mom hated the mailbox. It’s the gateway from hell, where a never ending flood of information and Stuff I Have to Do Something About pours in, all of it demanding attention and decisions. My inbox is filling up all the time. It doesn’t help that I have two of them–one for work and one for personal stuff. And the things just won’t stay empty.
I’ll work and slave to get to “inbox(0)” status. The moment I reach it, I turn away for one second–ONE SECOND–and that lousy thing has like 15 new messages waiting for me.
They’re seldom good messages, is the thing. I mean, now and then I’ll get fan mail telling me how much someone loved my book, and that’s just plain lovely. 100% great. But just like getting a tax return check in the mail doesn’t make the flood of other stuff any better, that fan mail doesn’t offset all the rest of it: ads, updates, listservs, church emails, school emails, scheduling conflicts, questions, requests.
I hates it. Hates it with a burning passion reserved by most people for post offices or DMVs or hobbitses.
But you know what’s the worst thing about it? I can’t look away. I hate my email, and yet I’m addicted to checking it. Because what if something awesome just showed up in there? What if I sold a book? What if a Nigerian Prince just left me a buhzillion dollars?
How sick is that? I know there’s hardly ever going to be anything good, and yet I keep going back every fifteen minutes or so.
At least with an actual mailbox, my mom knew she was just getting mail once a day. Now we have mail that comes 24/7, always ready to screw up your day with some awful news. (Note: I haven’t received any awful news today. Yet.)
Remember when getting email was all Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? These days it’s all Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.
‘Nuff said.
If you sold a book, someone will call you. This is why I don’t like my work email. It’s NEVER good news. Just rejections.
I was trying to think of some ways email might be okay some of the time. But you’re right. It’s all yuck.