Do not delete!

Posted: May 12, 08 6:06am

I remember when first got e-mail and Internet service.

I was a late starter so I’d heard of all the wonderful capabilities and the phenomenal tasks that could be accomplished with just the click of a button.

Being online was so exciting…okay there were a few reality checks.

It wasn’t exactly as quick as just clicking a button (these were the dial-up days), there was a lot waiting involved. This should’ve been time put to good use, but it wasn’t. The waiting always involved staring at the screen, finger poised on the mouse and watching so that the next step could be taken the moment the first was complete.

Another wake-up was the “unlimited memory” thing. People told me that I could store “A warehouse of information on my hard drive”!

Apparently, my idea of a warehouse was the hanger that houses the GoodYear blimp, but what ‘they’ really meant was that I had one of those little mini-storage units at my disposal. Scanning in every receipt, every progress report and every Sunday comix cartoon that you ever read, quickly teaches you that moving your junk from your house to your hard drive is not always the best solution to your clutter problem.

One of the things that helped clutter up my computer was the most wonderful thing that people referred to as “Mommy Mail”.

Although I don’t like the moniker (implying that mommy’s have nothing better to do), I loved getting “Mommy Mail”…at first…for about six months.

I had great friends. They’d send me jokes, articles, prayers, etc. What a wonderful way to put a smile on someone’s face. I could then push the forward key and whisk that same smile off to five thousand of my best friends.

Until one morning when I came back to find eighty unread messages in my inbox and I had just taken a break to clean the commode. Twelve of them were spams. The other sixty-eight were jokes, prayers, articles, etc.

This was when my e-mailing habits began to change. I read through the jokes and forwarded them. I glanced at the subjects of the articles and deleted them. I put the prayers, unopened, in a folder marked ‘inspirational’ to read at a later date. I was putting God on hold!

Then I started resenting them. What did it mean that if I didn’t forward it to twelve of my friends I would be disemboweled by wild animals? Why was the Internet suddenly in control of my destiny? When had it become my Higher Power? Tell me the truth, when was the last time that you forwarded one of those things to eight poor unsuspecting friends and something spectacular appeared on your screen? I don’t know what I’d been expecting? A row of dancing chipmunks waving banners and chanting “Congratulations, you have just surrendered all free will to the Divinity of cyberspace” maybe?

I still enjoy the jokes…some of them. And inspiration…when I need it. And articles…if they’re on a subject that interests me.

Some people here on TBD will post things like this (mostly in the evenings). I like that. I enjoy reading these e-mails, but like it when they’ve been filtered through Spuff, Gator Girl, Britscot or any of the others who share the ones that are truly funny and are appropriate for the discussion at hand.

I guess I just like my Mommy mail screened first.

How do you like yours?