Mail giving us a Break

Look at this piece of news taken at random from somewhere in today's paper: "14.4 million letters are lost in the mail every year." Worldwide I guess. Just imagine, and this in our modern e-mail/Internet day and age.

(Microsoft Media)

But it's right, just as little as "video kills the radio star" has ever become a reality - since radio stations still abound, and there is still talk-back radio and there are even radio stations that are exclusively on the Internet (perhaps for not having secured a wavelength or wanting to pay for being allocated one) - will papery mail, now called snail mail, ever disappear.

Snail Mail has its place in history as well as in contemporary life, and it will possibly have one for quite a few more years to come. Post offices still earn money letting PO boxes, posties still cruise the suburbs. And at times, going by some newspaper articles (oh, there still are the papery things in spite of online papers - and why are they called papers when they are on-screen, anyway?), some people are beginning to perceive email as being too slow.

(Microsoft Media)

But imagine everything happening in real-time. People will go ballistic, in particular at the receiving end of twittery and facebooky facilities in their offices - and privately for that matter when message senders expect immediate attention to their blurb.

Quite a few people are bound to go ballistic without snail and e-mail. No, email (no matter how you spell it as long as you can tell it from enamel, which at times is a problem is some lingos other than English) might be faster than snail mail but slower than Messenger, Skype or any other immediate means of communication other than the phone, but it has this advantage of being an in-between kind of thing that some people take to be just a sign of being a temporary kind of technology.

(Microsoft Media)

No, in-between is not the same as temporary, mind you. The beauty of e-mail as an institution, and individual emails as instances of it, is that it, and they, can save you time and money. But e-mail also gives you a bit of a time buffer. A more or less important e-mail arrives and you have time to finish something else first, perhaps go and get a cuppa, without, at least in most cases, the sender becoming nervous and agitated for not having received a reply within two minutes.

The expectation of getting a response from an email may be somewhat more inclined towards the fast lane but not too much, not as much as expectations tied to snail mail would be in any case. But e-mail does give people a nice break. Enjoy it.