In trying to set up interviews for the impending road trip, and from a long semester of thwarted articles, I've come to two conclusions.
1. People don't respond to email these days.
2. People don't return calls these days.
True -- there were times during the semester when I was the worst offender on both of these counts. Sending me an email on Wednesday (Chimes production night) is like launching a message into a black hole. I would read it instantly, and it would get permanently lost in a quagmire of the 40 other emails that came in that day.
But Bethany and I discussed this -- how courteous is it when someone DOES respond to a message or call? It's like a breath of fresh air. A prompt reply is rare and wonderful. It's like the advanced evolutionary stage of caring. My goal is to be prompt like that this year.
1. People don't respond to email these days.
2. People don't return calls these days.
True -- there were times during the semester when I was the worst offender on both of these counts. Sending me an email on Wednesday (Chimes production night) is like launching a message into a black hole. I would read it instantly, and it would get permanently lost in a quagmire of the 40 other emails that came in that day.
But Bethany and I discussed this -- how courteous is it when someone DOES respond to a message or call? It's like a breath of fresh air. A prompt reply is rare and wonderful. It's like the advanced evolutionary stage of caring. My goal is to be prompt like that this year.
I stumbled across this Wordsworth poem, which I think would be an ample (albeit melodramatic) response to derelict emailers:
W. Wordsworth
To a Distant Friend
WHY art thou silent? Is thy love a plant
Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air
Of absence withers what was once so fair?
Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant?
Yet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant,
Bound to thy service with unceasing care—
The mind's least generous wish a mendicant
For nought but what thy happiness could spare.
Speak!—though this soft warm heart, once free to hold
A thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine,
Be left more desolate, more dreary cold
Than a forsaken bird's-nest fill'd with snow
'Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine—
Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know!
W. Wordsworth
To a Distant Friend
WHY art thou silent? Is thy love a plant
Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air
Of absence withers what was once so fair?
Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant?
Yet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant,
Bound to thy service with unceasing care—
The mind's least generous wish a mendicant
For nought but what thy happiness could spare.
Speak!—though this soft warm heart, once free to hold
A thousand tender pleasures, thine and mine,
Be left more desolate, more dreary cold
Than a forsaken bird's-nest fill'd with snow
'Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine—
Speak, that my torturing doubts their end may know!
3 comments:
You know exactly who that poem is for. Maybe I should send that to him? Nah, I would not get a RESPONSE! Haha...I'm just commenting on all your stuff tonight Chelle, and even though you aren't here, and come to think of it, neither is anyone else, I am having a jolly-good time, finding my repeated comments quite hilarious!
It's a crack-up that if I delete a comment it posts that I did that!
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