modern etiquette

Some people clearly aren’t aware of certain social etiquettes. Etiquettes which allow us to live in a civilized society. And when civilized etiquettes aren’t followed, society just isn’t as civilized as it should be.

For instance, when you ask someone ‘how are you’ they’re expected to answer ‘fine’. Because the truth is that you could really care less how they’re doing. And when that person starts to actually tell you how they are the whole fabric that holds society together begins to unravel.

I bumped into an old high school friend last week, and after a short ‘catching up’ which entailed where we work, where we live, and recalling the old high school memory of how Brett got his head stuck in a gym locker one day, I felt that we were adequately caught up…at least for another decade.

As he was leaving, he asked for my email address…because email is the new phone, and nobody who’s anybody ever asks for a phone number anymore. It’s just too ‘low-tech’.

So I gave out my email address with the unspoken rule that, in giving him this email address, he was never to use it. But this weekend he emailed me, thus breaking the unwritten ‘giving of email addresses to acquaintances’ rule. And, as if this wasn’t bad enough, the email he sent consisted of exactly 21 words, words which were strung together in this way:

dude, good seeing you. wild times! i still keep up with some of the gang we should all party sometime. peace!

And this is why I will forever safeguard my email address from now on, because high tech communication doesn’t make communication better…it just makes it easier to communicate without actually communicating anything at all.

If we were still in the ‘write a letter and stick it in the mail’ days, this type of thing would never have happened. Besides the fact that the actual act of writing requires a lot of work, you’d realize that you really need to have a lot to say to make it worth the 37 cents that it will take to say it. At 21 words, you’re paying almost two cents a word, and when you’re paying two cents for the word ‘dude’ you’re getting screwed.

But with email, economics is taken out of the equation. And now, people all over the world are communicating haphazardly at lightning fast speeds, and saying very little in the process. So many emails, delivered so very fast, that I can barely keep up with all of my not responding.