My spam filter must have trashed it.


Or maybe "my service provider was down and three days of mail were lost", or .... There are any number of possible reasons we can think of for not responding to an e-mail message, or for not responding soon enough. Because of the immediacy of e-mail, and the ease with which we can send off a reply, we tend to think of these as excuses and not as explanations. It becomes difficult to think of why someone might not respond immediately.

But there really are good reasons:
I decided to go to sleep early last night.
I was trying to write something and didn't want to disturb my train of thought.
I read a book.
It slipped my mind.
It just didn't seem that important.
The point being that we really shouldn't have to make up excuses. In most circumstances we shouldn't have to view e-mail as an assignment, but as what it was originally designed to be - a form of correspondence. And if we don't receive the prompt reply we either expected or were hoping for, we can always send another message: "please respond".



Go to: Confessions of a conservative technology freak.