The Last Word On Nothing

“Sorry for the delayed response.”

Wait, you emailed me unsolicited asking for free work.

Should I feel sorry for being slow when I have so much on my plate?

Do men ever apologize for the delayed response?

I bet they don’t.

You know what, fuck it, why should I kill myself to respond to all these emails when men never seem to care.

Wait, should I model my behavior on men who are bad at email and don’t care about inconveniencing others?

Why can’t we ask men to be better at something instead of telling women they don’t have to be good at something they’re already good at?

Also, if I stopped replying to email I’d be considered and flaky bitch, not a cool and important man.

Also sometimes emails are important!

And why do we devalue email in the first place? Why it is either “art or email” as if email isn’t a crucial piece of the function of most organizations?

Wait you’re asking me for free consulting, should I even reply to this at all?

But if I don’t reply then they might think I’m a jerk.

Or they might follow up and then I’ll feel even more guilty.

Is it really this person’s fault, or the fault of the mutual acquaintance who gave them my email without asking?

Should I send a separate email asking that acquaintance not to do that?

Or does that make me look like a bitch?

And then if they reply I’ll have to reply to that email which doubles my current problem.

Let’s just see how aruduous this request really is.

Oh god these questions are so vague I don’t even know how I would reply.

By they seem nice.

Let’s google them and see what else they’ve done and try to figure out if they really need my help.

Wait why am I doing this?

Maybe I should write a form response to these kinds of questions, so I can just send that out.

How long should that be?

I should probably put a lot of links in here.

Maybe I should write myself a whole document full of common form responses, it might be a lot of work now but it will come in handy in the future.

I’ll make it really organized.

Oh maybe a spreadsheet!

I should probably read some articles about the best auto-email response plugins out there.

Are any of these secure? What does the EFF say about them?

A nicer looking encryption system! Okay sure I’ll set that up too.

Oh man I should probably finally setup that VPN.

“Sorry for the delayed response, I lost track of time reformatting my entire computer and evaluating the sociological nature of email. Please never email me again.”

Image: Typing Contest, Bernard Goldbach, Flickr.