How do you disappoint people?
Lately I’ve been forgetting to answer e-mail, which pissed people off. It pisses ME off when people don’t answer my e-mail. Do I owe you an e-mail? Can you yell at me about it in comments or something? When things start to go off the rails in terms of my schedule, I set one thing aside and then it’s like dominos.
A.
Continuing to exist. Which I do just to spite them all. ALL.
i need to go to bed before 4:30 am.
Not emails per se, but I refuse to read text messages. I figure since they know my cell number (and not too may people get that privilege) and they want to tell me something they can talk to me. I don’t need a bunch of mis-splt wrds 2 wst my tm. LOL WTF OMG! Screw ’em.
i am homosexual. this apparently, makes some people want to kill me. because, jeebus. or something.
Apparently I disappoint people by speaking of the shortcomings of various democrats in a less than charming accent.
But when I do these things with a charming accent… ¡Hey Presto! Everyone, they love it, no?
Most curious.
I think I managed to terribly disappoint my very religious, very Catholic mother when it became apparent I’d chosen rational secularism over dogmatic mythology. So it goes…
m – I always wondered about text messages. I actually turned them off on my cell phone. Why deal with – and pay for – all the message spam? Either call me, email me or send it certified with a return receipt tag.
A – Nope. You don’t owe me an email or a text. You owe yourself some quiet time to catch up. The writer Mark Evanier has a prolific web site, but whenever he gets behind, he posts a picture of a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup which he claims is the internet standard signal that one is behind in real life and there will be no online updates until the real paying work is done. Granted, he’s a comedy writer, so he can get away with it.
Other Letters – I’m sure I do disappoint people, but I do make an effort at what we used to call at work expectations management. Basically, it’s about not making promises you can’t keep. Since I tend to underestimate myself, I can make all sorts of promises and raise all sorts of expectations without a lot of disappointment. As for those I disappoint despite this, my apologies. Let’s be more careful up front next time.
The Point of Texts: to contact someone with brief, non-urgent information that doesn’t require a) inane pleasantries like “hello, how’s life” to preface or b) interrupting whatever someone is doing because you need to talk to them NOW. It’s like leaving a voice mail, but in text form. And it’s accessible anywhere you can get any sort of phone reception, not just where you can access the internet (also, not everyone has email on their phones).
I communicate more via text than via voice on my phone by probably a 50:1 ratio.
No-one OWES me email. Communication is always voluntary.
I learnt “texting” when my SO had a pager, which I could send a short email to, in the Dark Ages. I didn’t need to call him, or he me (we both worked in offices with auto-answering setups that took several minutes to operate, as you couldn’t, back then, “jump the message”). We could just communicate. I think I had 30, maybe 40 characters — it was supposed to let you leave a number & “short” message (like call please).