Got It!
In their honest desire to make our lives easier and by the bye separate us entirely and finally from our brain stems, the fine people who manage the world’s email systems have devised automatic replies to incoming emails that quickly dispatch the note and let the reader turn her attention to the next several in the inbox queue.
It is the type of solution that would be proposed, or ever occur, only to someone who views human interaction via language as an impediment to progress, either progress through the day, or through history itself to some promised land of the future, where language has been reduced to its atomic units and no longer holds together at all.
We can picture the scene, several young data scientists sitting around the table discussing what improvement to bring the world next, and this one up-and-coming fellow says, “you know what really gets to me? It’s having to answer people who write me emails. I’m spending entire seconds of the day involved in human discourse! It’s holding me back, I tell you. If only there were a way to speed up the process.”
And as though a set of light bulbs had turned on above the heads of everyone at the table, the discussion leapt into high gear and went on from there at an accelerated rate.
Wanting to give the subject a vast range of possible responses expressive of the breadth of the human condition, there are often several replies listed as possibilities, in the nature of:
Thanks! Got it! Sounds good!
And indeed, this just about covers the entire range of the human emotional experience.
Remember, these are young people and from what I hear heavily tilted towards the male side of the species. That might have something to do with it.
If these mini-phrases don’t start a meaningful dialogue with the sender, what will?
I mean, Thanks, Got It, and Sounds Good, covers just about all that can be covered, right? If this doesn’t do it then the subject must be one of those people who, for some shadowy reason or other, insists on communicating in full sentences, sometimes for whole paragraphs at a time.
Sad!
Still, it may be that these brief replies themselves will fall short now and again.
When your friend Allan, gone these several weeks on his tour of Eastern Europe, particularly as regards the picturesque and more remote regions of Transylvania, writes you a note summarizing his adventures, it might go something like this.
My Dearest Edgar,
I only have a furtive moment to dash this note off. I cannot tell you the danger I have fallen into! My stay at this isolated castle is no longer one of pleasure but of imprisonment!
I am isolated in my room and after the first night have never again directly laid eyes upon my host, the Count. But in fact…he is everywhere.
I tell you Allan, there are strange happenings within these fell walls, strange sounds, strange sights! It chills the blood to recount them and I haven’t the time or the spirit to undertake the task, but these are unholy doings! Unholy!
You must not think me mad, for I surely am not, but I can be forgiven for being frightened out of my reason.
Only I and now you are in a position to communicate the danger to the rest of the world.
Upon receipt of this note you must immediately get in touch with a certain Professor Van Helsing, of the University of Leipzig. He has long studied matters of this dark nature, and is one of the few people that can save me – and the world! – from the mortal danger presented by the Count.
I am depending on you, Allan, and know that you will act with dispatch.
Your desperate friend, Edgar.
Well, in the course of a busy morning at the office when your first thought is to somehow manage the flow of emails that have come in overnight, including this one sent furtively from Transylvania, you cannot afford to linger over any one note.
The emphasis these days is on progress, and you may have set a personal goal of concluding this particular task of email cleanup before the clock has struck the quarter hour.
You take in the note is from good old Edgar, or scan it at least, or let your eye glance for a millisecond on the screen.
He seems to have arrived at this remote section of the world that he has always been talking about, and his tone, upon the quickest of glances, seems to be excited, even feverish.
It is the matter of a moment to select one of the options provided to you and send it in reply:
Glad all is well! See you when you get back!
Poor Edgar, who doesn’t quite know that he will ever get back or that the world at large will ever be the same, looks in wonder at the reply and more or less starts giving some consideration to throwing in his lot with the vampires, who all in all seem to have more on the ball than the humans.
The next note up is from this fellow you went to school with who subsequently snagged a research job at the highest levels of government.
Edgar,
I don’t know where else to turn. All other of my correspondents are under surveillance, but you no one knows about.
I tell you as a matter of the utmost urgency that members of the Cabinet, along with several high ranking members of Congress, as well as the entire backfield of the team who won the Super Bowl, spent all of this last Sunday playing flag football on the White House lawn using as a football….the parcel that contains the nuclear launch codes!
It is well known that this package is referred to colloquially as ‘the football,’ but it never crossed my mind to consider that anyone would ever take it seriously.
The word must get out, Edgar! I implore you to contact the media immediately. The fate of the world rests in your hands.
Your friend, Jeremy.
Good old Jeremy! It’s good to hear from him. If you had bothered to read the note you’re certain that it would reveal that he is doing well!
You are pleased to send a quick reply letting him know that you have received his cheery email and are delighted that things seem to be going so well for him
Good to hear! Take care.
Your next correspondent, serious and intent Vladimir, always with the subterranean exploration and analysis of unusual sonar readings emanating from the mantle of the earth and the floor of the sea, sends you a quick note:
Edgar, I only have time to dash this off.
Our worst fears have been realized! The most recent underground nuclear testing has stirred an ancient monster from the deep! This beast – I have called him Godzilla from a timeless Japanese legend – is of a size and proportion that can only mean destruction for the human race!
I tell you, if he only so much as strides through city streets the whole area will be destroyed! If he only so much as gazes at our puny weapons with his Death Ray Eyes, they will turn to dust!
You must alert the proper authorities the moment you get this! Do not hesitate! The fate of the world depends on you!
Trusting in your valor and speed, dear friend.
Well, if that isn’t Vladimir to a tee, the reader says to himself with a smile. Always with the exclamation points. Though that is about the only thing he takes in from the note.
Vladimir seems to be fully engaged with his research though, which is always a good thing, so you send off a note in reply letting him know that you are thinking of him.
Thanks for the update! Talk soon!
Well, and so it goes. This one fellow goes to some length to let Edgar know that the experiment has gone awry and as it turns out he hasn’t stitched together a superior being from some spare parts he has lying around at all, but instead now has a murderous monster on his hands terrorizing the countryside.
Our friend replies:
Either day works for me!
Another friend, this one more of an acquaintance, drops a line to inform Edgar, and by the bye the world at large, that there has been a serious spill of the secret deadly pathogen and people subsequently seem to flipping into zombies at an alarming rate. What better reply in the circumstances than to say:
No plans yet! Let’s talk later in the week!
It has long been a question that thoughtful people have dwelt upon: how exactly will the world end? Some say fire, some say ice, but more and more of us are saying email.
