WORDS FROM W.W. December 27, 2019
It’s the electronic version of breeding rabbits. One disappears and three others suddenly start hopping around to take its place. You should see the rabbit paw prints in my backyard snow. They resemble a bad Picasso painting, all in white.
I’m talking about my email! It seems to grow exponentially. Something piques my interest, like KiwiCo Toys, so I click on the Facebook ad. Now I get an avalanche of KiwiCo ads on Facebook and also in my email. Curiosity killed the cat, but 50 ads a day killed the interest of this “cat!”
I’ve done Trivia Today, an email I receive twice daily, but now my inbox is also populated with Trivia Daily, Trivia Genius, Trivia Draws, Trivia Today: This Day in History, Trivia Cafe’, and FunTrivia. I receive so many trivia emails I feel shallow, like I no longer am able to think deeply.
Now when Carol and I go somewhere instead of conversation about subjects like Jesus, family, and the latest advances in knee replacements we go through emails and delete them. I swear last night we eliminated 15 emails on our short drive home from Costa Vida restaurant, but 45 new ones then flocked in to take their place. It reminded me of feeding pigeons in the park.
We took a Viking River Cruise last May with our friends, Dave and Robyn Hughes. Viking now seems to think we want to take a cruise a week. Every day we receive an email with a “limited time offer.” Crystal Cruise Line must have gotten word of us as well because they come calling, er…emailing, every day as well.
Then there’s the political emails. It seemed to take me forever to get off the Tea Party list. And every time I asked to be unsubscribed it seemed like I attracted the attention of five other conservative watchdog groups. It reminds me of the lint in my pants pockets that just seems to come from nowhere.
I receive NRA, CNN, SI, NCAA, the NBA, and DSW emails on a daily basis. One time four years ago we ordered a tee shirt from fanatics.com and now they are fanatical about sending us the daily offer quadrupled!
I get an email each day that the latest copy of our local newspaper is available. It’s the same newspaper that I unsubscribed to in mid-September.
We keep unsubscribing and the emails keep repopulating. At least the “Russian Women Are Looking For You” emails have stopped. Of course, ancestry.com rushed in to take their place. Every time I order something from Amazon they send me emails about some other products that I might be interested in.
Perhaps I should do an “email fast”. Commit to not looking at email for a day, maybe a forty day fast. Maybe I should give up email for Lent.
If I did, guess what would happen? I’d be digging out for the next month!
Remember the good ole’ days when you’d get six pieces of mail in the mailbox, spend the next two minutes considering their value, and then get on with your life? We’d get the new copy of the TV Guide and then sit in front of our television flipping back and forth between the four stations we received. We didn’t know how blessed we were, did we?
And in writing these words I realize that it will require some of my readers to open an email! Ironic, isn’t it?
Words from WW Blog 