Lost in the mail
I am not a great fan of Internet Chat services.
Don’t get me wrong, they can be very useful, especially for someone like me, living so far away from home, with business partners and clients scattered all around the world. I have registered and signed up for a couple of services but, to be honest, most of the time I find them frustrating and annoying, rather than a boon.
I can be in the middle of something and the computer beeps at me … someone has logged in …. and, OK, it may well be someone I want to, or need to talk to, but most of the time it is not and all that is has been achieved is that my concentration has been broken. So, I quickly learned to turn off this alert.
Now I get a bleeped at only when someone wants to “buzz” me, they want to talk with me or send me a file. That’s better … but all the same, I find I get beeped three or four times as they keep typing two or three words and then hitting ‘Enter’ … worse, they may not have typed anything – just sent me a little “smiley” face, either smiling (that’s why they are called “smileys”); rolling around in fits of laughter; winking; waiving; holding a glass of beer, (presumably saying: “its “beer o’clock” … are you free for a bevy?”) or turning green, (often meaning, “why haven’t you answered me? – I have been bleeping you for ages …” … Sorry, I’m in a meeting – I’m busy!).
Internet chat is part of our modern world … it demands instant gratification. The problem with this is that an instant response is often badly worded, or ill considered, … or both.
I prefer to get a message, think about it, compose a reply and then review it, before I actually send it.
In that respect, I prefer email.
As well as giving me the luxury of being able to take my time to think through a question, email doesn’t require that my correspondent is logged on at the same time as I am … which can be quite useful when they are in a different time zone on the other side of the world.
Over the weekend, I got a surprise in the email … a message arrived from one of our business partners about some clients crossing Torugart. In itself, that is not very odd, except I was surprised that he was writing to me. Normally he would correspond with one of our tour managers and I would only get involved if there was a fundamental problem. The fact that he was writing direct to me implied that we had a fundamental problem.
The problem, it seemed to me, was that we didn’t have any of his clients crossing Torugart at the moment … or, at least, not as far as I am aware. Then the message, just one line, seemed to be rather cryptic … no details, no question, just a wry comment, a sort of “verbal smiley”.
Confused, I got up to go and search out the person who usually deals with his account, and suddenly, I don’t know why, I glanced at the screen and noticed something odd.
“That can’t be,” I thought to myself. The message was date stamped January 8th, 2008.
I wrote quick enquiry and got an almost instant response … yes, it was a genuine message sent on January 8th, 2008. So where had it been all this time … more than two years and five months.
I’ve heard of letters and postcards, birthday cards and cheques getting lost in the post … isn’t that a time worn excuse for tardiness … but emails lost in the internet?
Now, we rely heavily on email for communication with our clients … and sometimes emails do go missing which can be very frustrating.
Maybe there is something to be said for internet chat after all.
Bishkek