I was slogging through the usual mountains of e-mail one recent morning when suddenly my screen showed something remarkable.
Nothing.
What had a moment earlier been my inbox was blank, except for one line:
“There are no items to show in this view.”
The Tribune’s e-mail system had gone down, hard. My e-mails were gone. Hundreds of them, dating back to March.
And I looked at that blank screen and thought:
Yesss!!!
Let others gnash their teeth and call tech support. I know a gift when I see it, and there might as well have been a great big bow tied on top of my monitor.
I was free.
Free of all those messages I should have responded to weeks ago; free of all the attachments I was supposed to have read, scrubbed clean as if I had undergone the technological equivalent of a colonoscopy prep.
The ideas I should have pursued or deleted, the conversations that I seem unable to conclude, the messages that have some thought or tidbit of information that I’m sure could be useful someday even though someday never comes — they were finally, thankfully, off my back and off my conscience.
And really, could there be a better resolution? It was swift, total and entirely excusable.
“Something ate all my e-mails,” I could whine, as convincingly as possible. Sure, nitpickers could hold me accountable for not responding, say, last spring. But whatever my previous sins, I was currently blameless. If I could just keep from doing the happy dance in public, I was golden.
Despite my glee, I do appreciate e-mail. Under control, it is an instantaneous marvel. And many of my messages are from lovely, interesting people. I would like to send them a thoughtful reply, someday.
I have only the best of e-mail intentions. I open a message, think about it and then close it, intending to take action later. Days pass; seasons change; I get e-mails that my storage capacity has been exceeded; the system stops me from sending messages.
Other people have managed to take control. My colleague Steve Johnson has reported that by moving e-mails into folders and their contents onto to-do lists, he once shrank his inbox from 1,937 messages down to 42 in only about 90 minutes.
I’ve tried. I’ve spent hours moving messages into folders and deleting others, only to have my inbox fill back up again. It’s like trying to mop a floor in the middle of a rainstorm.
But why nibble at the edges of a problem if you can simply blow the whole thing up?
Some brave souls have declared e-mail bankruptcy, a phrase coined by Internet legal expert Lawrence Lessig, who did it in 2004 in a mass message addressed “Dear person who sent me a yet-unanswered e-mail.”
After spending 80 hours going through e-mails dating back two years, wrote Lessig, a law professor now at Harvard, he was giving up. He apologized and told “creditors” that if they responded to his e-mail, their notes would be marked for special attention. But he was wiping his slate clean.
I’ve never had the guts. But now a snafu had done the dirty work for me. It was out of my hands, an act of the digital gods.
I pretended to join in the consternation. Would tech support be able to restore the lost e-mail? My hope was as strong as those of colleagues, though probably not for the same outcome.
I enjoyed the peace of the unreachable. I got work done. I used the telephone.
It was too good to last.
At the day’s end, the e-mails popped back into my inbox. Every guilt-inducing one of them.
Danged tech support.
Maybe I should have seen the crash as an opportunity. After my e-mails returned, I could have erased them all myself and blamed the crash. After all, the Lord helps those who help themselves. And who besides my colleagues would have known?
But I couldn’t do it. And so the day served as a glimpse of possibility, a goad to try harder to edit my e-mail myself and a reason for hope.
Maybe next time the system will crash a lot harder.
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bbrotman@tribune.com
