For too long our email inboxes have treated us poorly, and it must end now.
If they’re on again off again, if they abandon you during the holidays and then bother you endlessly during term time and if they leave you stressed, sad, and ultimately broken – they’re not your romantic partner, they’re your Outlook inbox.
Throughout term, they deluge us with information: tutorial work, society newsletters, library fines, all when we’re too stressed and overrun to deal with the flood of communications.
Much like Sisyphus, the task of email maintenance is unrelenting and punishment beyond all imagining.
Yet when it comes to the vac – a time when we’re generally at a loose end looking for something to do or read – they desert us.
Which of us has not felt the cold sense of abandonment upon checking their normally bursting inbox during the vacation to find that nothing has been received in over a week? Just when we need them most to give us some direction or activity in the vast stretches of emptiness between the ever over-burdened 8 weeks, the emails dry up. With the remaining names, subject lines, and icons etching themselves repeatedly into our irises.
We are left barren.
Bereft.
Lonely.
It’s the hoping that kills you.
Each log-on a hope for attention cruelly crushed… if it were merely an issue of finding alternative occupation during the holidays, then perhaps I could forgive my inbox for having some time off, but as we all know, inboxes have a further unacceptable vice we have for too long accepted. They’re just so damn needy. When they’re not mind-numbingly empty, they swing to the opposite end of the spectrum during term, constantly pinging notifications at you.
Just when you’re two hours off an essay deadline and desperately trying to write a conclusion, your email inbox will decide to start buzzing every two seconds, throwing out those obstructive visual prompts and annoying bell sounds to get your attention. And should you decide to – as a perfectly normal person would – temporarily mute this panoply of irritation, you’ll discover upon your return a notification in bold: “57 unread items”. It’s absolutely torturous.
What an obvious trick by our emails to get us to spend more time with them, forcing us to read each piece of digital detritus to end the glaring warnings. DO NOT be fooled by such duplicity: email inboxes are attention whores who will keep demanding your attention, however much you try to soothe them. It’s time to end this toxic relationship: email inboxes are simply capricious on again-off-again lovers who will always treat us poorly.
We’re as mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it for one second more. It’s time to rise up and say no!
Maybe this breakup can be the catalyst to make them change their ways and learn how to treat us well, but I’m not holding out hope.
If anyone needs to send me a message please call, text, send a messenger boy, or a carrier pigeon, but for the love of God not an email.
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