by Tom Wald, Founder of Sound Off To America
The other day I received an email which read in its entirety as follows:
“Do you want to give me a call about this?”
There was only one problem. It was an attached response to an email I had sent this person more than two years earlier. Actually I took a minute to count it out, two years, three months a week and two days to be exact. The “this” he was referring to was a business inquiry long since irrelevant.My choices were to ignore his belated response or send him a clever reply. But for some reason I didn’t want to let him off the hook so easily. For some reason I felt the urge to let him know that not everybody waits around 863 days for email replies.
As a kid I read Mad Magazine a lot and my favorite section was the infamous Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. So that’s where my mind went. The quips started rolling off my tongue.
“Thanks for your prompt reply, are you sure you didn’t want to wait another term of Congress before getting back to me?”
“Sounds good. Lets schedule a chat for some time around mid 2012.”
“Sorry, I just got this taken care of about an hour ago.”
“Gee, the last time I thought about this the Dead Sea was still sick.”
“You know, after more than two years would it have killed you to say HELLO?”
Of course following this diversion in self amusement came the logical decision to simply ignore his correspondence and let it fall into my black hole of unreturned emails just as mine had fallen into his back when the world seemed certain our next President would be either Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani.
However, I still had some innate curiosity as to what this guy was actually thinking. Couldn’t he have at least opened with something like “My apologies for not staying in touch” or “I’m sorry for the delay in getting back to you.” He could have even lied and gone with something like “Believe it or not I just opened this email” or at the very least “Hope you have been well”. But there had been none of that, just the curt reintroduction of himself in the form of “Do you want to give me a call about this?” The inherent arrogance in that short sentence really bugged me. As if pulling up a two year old email from the archives of your inbox was tantamount to some sort of a time machine that could erase all that had transpired, or in this case I should say all that had not transpired, since that date.
Wouldn’t we all love to have that luxury. Simply retrieve an email from a certain moment in our past and get a complete do-over on everything thereafter. I bet Tiger Woods would jump at that one.
Of course by now I had realized I should be getting on with my day so I reached to hit delete but just before doing so I remembered something an old friend once told me. There’s usually nothing wrong with simply answering someone’s question. So I just typed the word “No” and hit send.
It may not have been all that snappy but something told me Alfred E. Newman would have been proud.
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