February 3, 2000

e-mailing

I get an e-mail from a friend asking how to pronounce Peony, the flower or the restaurant in our hood. Her dining club, the Gnome club (girls night out men excluded) is going there for her birthday. Pee-oh-knee for those rushing to their dictionaries to look it up and confirm their knowledge.

I try to handle things with e-mail. Sometimes people get upset but often they communicate more than in meetings. Did I mention I hate meet. I have two e-mail accounts, of course. Work and home. Usually I am hooked up to both in my home office. In the morning before I actually drive to work, I check my work mail and my personal mail.

People don't snail mail much. I correspond often with Mags in South Africa. Occasionally we send each other a postcard or a clipping. That's rare.

Today I got a e-mail from an aunt. It's obvious she just got AOL. Can't imagine how she will react to the porno come-ons she is sure to get in her inbox. Or was it just me when I was on there? She tried to get my address from my mother. She got the lbffp.com part right. Thankfully, if a person gets that right and there's no e-mail account it goes to the domain owner. On our provider anyway. Domains are interesting. They are selling on ebay even. We have goodrightarm.com, too, but we just redirect it to this set of pages for now.

I get a variety of 'offers' in my person mail. Comes from filling out forms to buy stuff, register. It's not too bad, though. I unsubscribe to ones I'm not at all interested in. Still get two or three a day, at least.

Still I have to fill my recycle sack with catalogs, offers of software and hardware, political junk, all that.

Today I worked. I got there at 8:30 exactly for a teleconference. The problem with worldwide is that it is a different time everywhere. Makes meeting inconvenient. But teleconferences are 10,000 times better than going to the other site.

Tried to study the presentations, info, issues and customers for the trip. Printed out phone numbers, hotel arrangements, people's names. Hard to keep up with all this. In between, I received phone calls and e-mails and delegated this and that. I sent e-mails to tickle people about things I think they might want to do. My job becomes more and more like a managerial job. I hate that. Thankfully without the personnel administration.

Tonight we went to a reception on Pease Road to try to get people to join an opera group that provides funds for the guest artists for the operas. We already coughed up. I think we had to invite some people who might do so. Forrest had invited a couple we met at a dance company benefit. They were interesting.

I drank a couple of glasses of wine. It gave me a little headache for some reason.

"But the mail lurks in the box at the house where you live."

Robert Penn Warren , End of Season

once we mailed