I thought it was too easy.
A week of long, fraught hours, early starts and late finishes, coupled with some bug or other to sap my remaining energy, ended with technical glitches… and, just for good measure, the internet went down too. By the time I got all that sorted, I was about ready to call it a day, grab a hot water bottle and retire, but I still had all the catching up to do…
Except, somehow, it didn’t seem to take long. An hour later and I was left only with the photo -prompt entries to read. That was a result!
It was also weird. My inboxes do not get away lightly as a rule, but they have been very quiet the past few days. Suspiciously so. Then I noticed the number of unread emails in my spam folder and groaned… for some reason, hundreds of the things had been automatically routed there, and I was going to have to go through the lot.
Cursing and grumbling, I went through the sender and subject of every darned email, returning each one to the appropriate folder. It took a while. I have not had much energy left at the end of the day, so for the past few days, I have not emptied my spam and delete folders before bed as I usually do. And apparently, this problem has been going on for several days.
I double-checked what was left, making sure that any personal, important or school-related stuff had been safely sequestered, and hit delete on the rest, trying not to feel guilty.
I thought, as I did so, how instant communication has changed our lives. We can speak to people across the world in real time… even face to face with free video calling if we choose… and couldn’t help thinking about how our emotional response to communication has changed too…
Continue reading at The Silent Eye
Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 
Reblogged this on Viv Drewa – The Owl Lady.
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Thanks, Viv xxx
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I enjoyed reading this. I am reminded how even though these posts and my everyday email are electronic, I carefully file each one (unless it is spam or other ads, etc.) away in an “online file cabinet” every day as if I am at some point going to read them all again. Now there are some that I do reread or tend to look up for reference. I save all of the animal photos the pet shelters send for animals that need to be rescued before they are put down. Now I clearly cannot rescue all of those poor dears, but their lives are sacred, and so I continue to symbolically rescue and treasure them all. It’s interesting how our lives morph over time with the advent of technology. In some ways it has made it possible for us to have so much more available. One can obtain a University degree online, including a Masters and a Ph.D., etc. And we can read literature from all over the world, learn just about any skills we can imagine (I was once shocked to see instructions for doing a surgery online). And we can see instant photos of virtually anyplace we would like to visit or learn more about in the whole world. We can view what the ocean looks like even deep down without ever having to learn scuba or other types of diving gear. And we can see creatures up close and personal that we have good reason to fear in person. There is hardly anything we cannot do without it. But I suppose I will never get over that need to file my posts and e-mails as if they are something sacred. And you know what? I guess they really are.
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There is an alchemy of words… alone they are nothing more than labels, combine them and you create something beyond meaning…and that really is sacred.
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Ahh, the old email trick, giving us that false sense of calm without an overwhelming inbox then suddenly, the joke’s on you. 😦 ❤
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Yep. I hae it when that happens 😦 x
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😦 ❤
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