A while ago, my older brother Cosmo posted about email on his blog. A sort of History of My Email Frequency story. He confessed:
I’ve always loved email, ever since that day in college when I learned it was possible to send messages around the world… for free!
My brother is kind of a dork. Even if he won’t admit it, which I’m pretty confident he would, I can say that because I’m his little brother. Case in point: ‘for fun' (his words, not mine), he built a chart of his email history, dating back more than twenty years. Something about it struck me, besides the fact he sent a lot of emails:
I take way too much time stressing over every word I say.
From what I remember, email was first used as a way of communicating short bits of information between universities. Keyword being ‘short.’ It seems safe to assume that ‘short’ could also imply ‘curt.’ But humans are weird and read into the words and punctuation, and email has naturally evolved as it’s become more of a staple way of communicating to anyone and everyone.
Enter me, grappling with word choice, triple-checking that I spelled a name right, and generally taking far too long to write an email. Not that any of those are bad things. Well, except for the third one. If I have any chance of hitting my brother’s peak of fifty-two emails per day, I need to be faster at choosing what I say and checking it twice. Also, not stressing so much about if I make a mistake.
