I'm REally Tired of This Subject by Pam Allen The advent of email and other electronic forms of communication has led to an outcry by old-school letter writing purists who fear. handwritten correspondence is dead

THE advent of email and other electronic forms of communication has led to an outcry by old-school letter writing purists who fear. handwritten correspondence is dead.

In my case, it was never alive.

I'm absolutely terrible at replying to letters. I love opening my mailbox, and pulling out a crisp envelope, hand addressed to me, filled with pages of hand-crafted lines of text. I open it in eager anticipation, and settle down to catch up on the latest news.

Four months later I get a phone call from the sender, inquiring if I received the letter.

Oh, I can sit down and write a reply, no problem there. It's the act of getting it from my hand to a United States Postal Service approved mailbox that stymies me every time. My credit report is filled with lines that say 'late pay' next to entries because of this shortcoming.

Thanks to email, I can dash off a reply and send it back in seconds. To me, and my friends, email is a blessing. Without it, they'd never know I was live.

As with everything, along with the good comes the bad. Maybe not bad, but at the very least, incredibly annoying. I call this new phenomena 'cyber laziness'. How can you tell if you, or any of the people you communicate with suffer from CL?

Open your inbox and look at your last 20 emails. If any one of them has more than two (2) 'Re's in the subject line, you're a victim.

How often have you fallen into this habit? You get an email from Morella with the subject line 'Bob's crack habit', you read it, and hit that handy little reply" button. three months later, Morella's emails now have the subject 'Re:, re:, re:, re:,re:, re:,(80 more Re's) Bob's Crack Habit'.

What is pathetic about this is the fact that Bob was thoroughly discussed in the first four emails, and you've since gone on to the Borg insurrection on Plutaris, cooking with moray eels, saving money by recycling used tires (they make GREAT place mats!), and other earth shaking events.

When either one of you changed the topic from Bob to something else, a new subject should have been entered into the subject field. How hard is it to highlight the old subject and either backspace or delete it out of existence and replace it with something more timely?

I admit, it's hard to come up with new and interesting subjects when you email someone a few times a day.

I have a good friend that I keep in close touch with (via email, of course), and I've often joked about how hard it is to come up with new subjects. I'm currently seeing how many variations of the word 'hey!' I can use.

'Heya!', 'Hey you!', 'Hey, how's it going?', 'Hey, how's Bob's crack habit?'. Of course, she still its 'reply', and starts the vicious circle all over again.

Isn't this akin to receiving a flesh and blood (okay, paper and ink) letter in the mail, and simply going through it and adding your comments in the margin of their letter, then mailing it back? Come on people, this is laziness, pure and simple!

It IS acceptable to use 'Reply' and the original subject if you are replying to an original letter. However, once the main topic changes, you are obligated to indicate it in the subject line.

No email should ever have more than two 're's in the subject, UNLESS it is one of those back and forth emails between you and a technical support person. If you change the subject in midstream, they will get hopelessly confused, and you'll have to start over.

Another downside in email that has multiple 're's in the title is that your first assumption is that it's one of those annoying chain jokes that Aunt Esther keeps sending you. The one that originated in Tibet, and has gone around the world four times, and been received by everyone with an email account at least 12 times.

It's impossible to remember every email you've sent and received, and after awhile, all those 're's' look the same. You begin to dread opening them, afraid of what they'll contain.

Thank you!

Copyright 2001 Pam Allen

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