In the old days, that is to say before Taco Bell, the WCW, and Turner Broadcasting, people communicated by spreading dye onto wood pulp that had been bleached, pressed flat, and dried.  This took time.  First you had to find some of the dried wood pulp.  Then you had to find a dye-dispensing device.  Finally, you had to get yourself comfy in a seating device positioned in front of a writing station.  Hopefully, you were one of the lucky few that had one of those new fangled glass bulbs designed by that smarty-pants Edison that had a little carbon filament, which glowed when negatively charged particles were being passed through it.  The rest simply squinted a lot. Communicating like this was labor intensive, time consuming, and finding where that last postage stamp disappeared to was frankly, enough to make you chuck the whole exercise and wait until the next reunion.

Then a new technology began to change things.  Folks stopped scribbling on wood pulp and instead began shouting into a carbon filled diaphragm that was connected to a public rat’s nest of copper lines crisscrossing the planet.  A new form of communication was created that was wonderful to use, instant and best of all; overcame that pesky problem of bad penmanship.  People loved the new system.  But as with all things that are functioning well and making life simpler the government had to get involved and break up the monopoly that had been doing such a good job all along into several little monopolies that pretty much let customer service fall into the toilet.

But all was not lost.   A little more than a decade prior to the little monopolies taking control of the most popular method of communicating, some guys working for the government were figuring out a way to connect really fancy electronic calculating devices of different types around the world together so they could share information.  By the time the little monopolies were just beginning to flex their muscle this new method of communicating had spread like a bad case of the flu throughout the planet and the people who had been using it in their government and university jobs to communicate with friends and colleagues all over the world figured it would be a pretty nifty idea if the general population got into the action as well.

Thus the phrase “you’ve got mail” became just another part of our collective culture.  Unfortunately we had been shouting into carbon fibers for so long that we had lost the art of communicating by spreading dye on wood pulp.  But the new method of communicating was so easy to use and best of all, instantaneous, that soon everybody got into the act of hitting a little piece of molded plastic emblazoned with the cryptic phrase of ‘enter’.

But as anyone who has received one of these new-fangled communiqués and has seen it glowing brightly on a piece of glass coated with phosphorescent material knows full well that our fellow ape descended life forms aren’t nearly as bright as they think they are and perhaps never really should have climbed down from the trees in the first place.  The reality of it is that the technology has grown faster than our ability to maintain common courtesy and thus many of the messages being sent are just downright nasty.

Much like the aforementioned Chinese curse the immediacy of electronic communication is a mixed blessing at best.  Sure, you can respond immediately to any message that comes your way but is this always really for the best?  Remember the old trick your mother used to tell you about counting to ten before you respond in anger.   The number most of you should count to before responding to that message in your in-box is significantly higher. 

A little breathing room goes a long ways to maintaining good relations.  Remember that the person on the other end of that message is person with feelings just like you.  At the very least please keep in mind that any point you are trying to make will be rendered less effective if you attempt to make comments about the other persons parents, or lack thereof.  Additionally, references to bovine excrement will guarantee to blow your credibility when discussing the upcoming Presidential election.  Lose the four letter words folks instead consider purchasing a good Thesaurus.

For those of you who have been the recipient of a finely crafted string of explicatives and are considering responding in kind, I would like to suggest a little analysis trick before you fire off your own barbed reply.  Take a second to check out the time stamp on the message while remembering some folks are taken to consuming certain chemicals before they take to writing prose. If the time stamp on the message says 2 a.m then you can assume the worst.  At the very least even without the assistance of chemical substances anyone still conscious at this time of the day can’t be all there.  Try to imagine the person on the other end of the message hair a mess, bloodshot eyes, and clothes in disarray.  You probably would walk on the other side of the street to avoid contact with this person so why would you risk enraging them now?

Sometimes the best answer to a message is none at all.  A gentle word may turn away wrath, but I find that simply keeping your mouth shut can even work better.  Remember, people do judge you by the words you use and if you commit them to writing potentially a great number of people can judge your words for some time to come so be careful what you say.

And one last plea from the author; that cute little saying you have at the bottom of every message you send because you believe that it contains a wealth of insight and you feel a moral obligation for some reason to share it with the rest of humankind…for God’s sake, please change it!