Back in the 1950s, the Reader’s Digest used to have a little
feature called ‘Laughter Is The Best Medicine’, one of the many pearls of
wisdom imparted by that amazing publication.
Today, I had cause to be angry with someone, so I composed
an email, detailing the causes of my anger with ice-cold precision. It took me about an hour to write.
I didn’t send it, of course, and nobody, including me, will
ever read it. But it did the trick. By the time I pressed the ‘Don’t Save’
button, I was laughing, mainly at myself.
The trouble with this is that a "send" button is so instantaneous and easy to press and so impossible to cancel. Now if you'd been handwriting a long response in green Quink you'd have hours before you got to the post office....
ReplyDeleteNot so impossible to cancel Rog, in gmail. You can create a setting that allows you to undo a sent email within a period you set, 5, 10, 20 or 30 seconds after you click "send". Quite handy if you accidentally click "send" before you've finished writing & also if you suddenly realise you said the wrong thing or didn't add the attachment, let alone having last second misgivings about the wisdom of sending in the first place. Or you cc'd everyone instead of bcc'ing them.
ReplyDeleteBut yes, sometimes I will write out a screed for posting, maybe on a surveyors' forum or suchlike & just before posting I might recall "If you gotta make a fool of somebody" (Bonnie Raitt preferably, rather than Freddie Garrity) & think to myself, do I want that fool to be me?