Emails

Email. Don’t you love the new technology of getting information from point a to point b? Forget the postage stamp of 37 cents, forget going to a mail box and dropping your letter in it, you just type your message on the computer, hit the send key and off it goes to the receiver. For free. No paying per letter, no mail box and dropping the letter off. It can be a note to say hi, or a long letter, anything you want it to be. So easy since you are already sitting at a computer. It is effortless and painless. What can be wrong with email? It is so simple, anyone can use it.

Well, let me tell you a funny mishap, it is funny now, after the fact. The other day I was typing a letter to send to someone. I was a little annoyed at first so I made mentioned what I was annoyed about and then went on to the mundane information I needed to share with that person. It wasn’t so private or personal, but the first paragraph was, as it showed my annoyance. I click from my address book and send. I happen to be using hotmail and when it finishes sending your email it tells you your mail was sent to that person. I take a look at the recipient and gasped! That was NOT the person to whom I addressed the letter to! No! No! No! I looked at my address book and realized that I had clicked on the name just below the rightful owner of that email. What could I do? I was stuck in such an embarrassing situation. I did not want that friend reading the email when it was not meant for her to read it. I realized that with hotmail, there was nothing I could do. So I emailed that friend, and told her, please forward the email back to me. And I hoped for the best. I thought about it for a moment and was happy that at least my error was favorable, and I trusted this friend not to read it any further than the salutation, realizing it was not for her. And she would delete it without causing me embarrassment.

When I spoke to her later that evening, she told me exactly that. She deleted the email until she read my next email asking her to send it back to me, I was thinking of resending it to the original person, but then I realized the information was already stale. My annoyance was old and unnecessary to reiterate it again and the rest of the email was unimportant by the time I received it back.

So this escapade made me think about emails. Who would think that this would happen? When you write a simple letter you address the envelope to who you want it to go to. You do not normally make this mistake in addressing an envelope to someone else! But with emails and electronics, we rely on them so heavily that we forget that we can make mistakes with them as well. Once an email is sent, there is no way to retrieve it (unless you are using AOL). It makes you think twice before you are sending an email to someone.

But apply this to other things in life. When we say things to people we cannot take back what we said. There is no “delete sent mail” option in real life. We must be careful with what we say! Words can hurt a person whether we intended it to or not. So with two weeks to Rosh Hashana, take the time and realize what you say and what you email. Think about it before you say or send. Would you regret this if it reached the wrong ears or eyes? And if yes, is it worth to say or write?
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