You know, I love to moan about how much I hate email.
I have to tell myself sometimes, stop complaining about email, Con, no one wants to hear it, other people have to deal with their email too.
But today I was thinking about how, for all its faults and the irritation it causes me, I wouldn’t want to to go back to a world sans email. Because how SLOW would things be if we only had letters for written communication. Or we had to just rely on telephone calls? Or – shudder – faxes?
One of my fountain pens – c’mon, you knew this post had to include a fountain pen somehow – has been misbehaving: alternately refusing to release any ink at all or ejecting huge blots, very temperamental. So I emailed the vendor. He graciously asked me to send it back to him, which I did.
Of course, in the way of these things, despite malfunctioning spectacularly for me, it performed fine for the vendor. Again, he was gracious, and has sent me a replacement.
This was of course lovely in itself, but what I’ve most enjoyed in this interchange is the emails we’ve exchanged, in which we’ve both professed to being fountain pen fanatics, and then written about our pens, and hints for tweaking bad pen feeds. There is a special joy when you can have a chat about something you’re particularly interested in with another person who shares the same interest, isn’t there?
This whole process would not have been so simple and enjoyable if not for email.
So the next time I get peeved about email, I shall try to remember what I do like about it.