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Caught in an
E-Mail Dominated Society
By Peter Bohush
"Take a letter, Maria
address it to my wife.
Say I won't be coming home.
Gotta find a new life."
-- R.B. Greaves
If R.B. had asked Maria to email his wife instead of sending a plain old letter to her,
he might not have had time to high tail it out of town and live to sing his song.
For hundreds of years -- way before Madonna and Sweatin' To the Oldies tapes and even
the Clapper -- getting a message to someone required a piece of paper, ink and an envelope
(so no one would see that you had nothing much to say).
Enter email. It's fast. It's cheap. It lets us stop licking stamps and use our tongues
for more useful things, like giving Bronx cheers at stockholders meetings.
Yep. Email is the hottest thing since Cremora. In fact, it's probably more popular
because Cremora gives you the opportunity to talk only to the people who happen to be
standing near the coffee pot at the same time you are. Email lets you talk to just about
anyone in whole wide world, with little risk of permanently staining your tie.
Go For It
To send email you need a few items. First, you need a really big,
expensive computer with flying burritos that wing across the screen when you don't do
anything for awhile. (This happens to me all the time.) Actually, you don't need the
burritos, but they're cool to have, so get them.
The second thing you'll need is a modem. Modem is an acronym for MOdulator DEModulator.
Modulating and demodulating is the painful process of changing computer signals from
digital to analog then back again so the computer can squirt information through the tiny
phone lines. It's a back and forth kind of thing, sort of like Ross Perot deciding whether
or not to run for president. (The screeching sounds your modem makes when it connects to
another modem are the two devices yapping about Ross Perot.)
Add a dash of communications software and you're ready to email to your heart's
content.
Think a weekly super yard sale on the East Lawn of the White House would be a good way
to reduce the deficit and create some quality time for squabbling Democrats and
Republicans? Send Bill Clinton an email message at President@WhiteHouse.gov. I'm sure he'll bring
you right down to Washington, D.C., to sit beside him at his next budget negotiating
session.
Actually, email Mr. Clinton (or any other federal politician for that matter) and
you'll get back a personalized, computer-generated form letter that says something like:
- Dear Bob.Citizen.Jerk@monkeyshines.com,
- Thank you for your message. The President will carefully review it and instruct his
staff to send you a Friend of Bill t-shirt order form.
Cool!
Actual useful addresses
Write "subscribe FINANCE" followed by your name, like this:
- subscribe FINANCE Alan Greenspan
in the body of an email message to LISTSERV@TEMPLE.EDU
to get the Electronic Journal of Finance.
Write "send index" to info@ssa.gov to get a
list of exciting Social Security Administration files available.
And to get information on the Online Career Center database, email to occinfo@mail.msen.com. Include the words
"send info" (duh) in the body of the message.
Quite honestly, I've never tried any of these and don't know if they work or not.
Everything I need to know about finance I learned from Quicken. I'm laying low from the
Social Scrutiny Administration and the last thing I want info about this late in my life
is a career!
Prooofreading is for sissies.
-- Jedediah Bohush, 1842
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