from all forms of keeping someone busy, a computer is probably one of the most successful ones. put together a internet connection and you can keep pretty much anyone who knows how to use a computer, entertained for a very, very long time; games, music, news, information about, well, anything basically, are just some of the possibilities.
having said that, i’ll add just another one to the list: email. why? well, because i’m addicted to it. now, one could say - but you created postcrossing, you can’t be addicted to email - not email! well, i am.
it’s nothing new really, but it got a lot more obvious to me today when i bumped into an article about email addiction. and… ok, it’s not like i’m worried about it or anything - i do believe email can be both a really neat work tool and also source of fun. oh, and no, i’m not in denial. or at least that’s what i think :)
so i thought of sharing some facts about my email to better picture my, cof, addiction, cof, and putted together some numbers about it. if i exclude my work email, my messages are distributed between 3 different accounts. between those, i sort my email into a total of 253 different folders. i rarely delete any email i receive - unless is spam of course -, so the consequence, is about 44k emails - 4 years worth of email to be precise.
do people write me a lot? well, not that much - it’s mostly mailing-lists i subscribe. if i get to read all those? well no, of course not - some mailing-lists i just skim through the messages subjects and that’s it. but, still, i did send all the 7000 emails archived on my sent folders so i’m bit prolific on that subject too i suppose.
but, maybe more important than the numbers, is actually the considerable amount of time i spend with it - thus the self-classification as addicted. i do spend a reasonable amount of my time every day reading, sorting or replying emails, when not just checking for the sake of it. and if i happen not to have access to it for a few days, i tend to get nervous and worried - some will say that’s normal, some will find it ridiculous.
either way, for all those that have put up with me and my email rant, here’s a useful link - a repository of all those emails that are forwarded ad infinitum from mailbox to mailbox: some funny, some interesting, some useful, some neither imho. but maybe it’s the opportunity you’ve been waiting for to finally ignore that boring ex-coworker and still be on top of the latest and greatest forward-to-all-address-book-once-again email messages.
now: i don’t know any coffee place in portugal where people share the table with strangers. moreover, i don’t think that it happens anywhere in europe for that matter - please let me know otherwise. so, i inquired a local about it and the explanation was a bit surprising; it seems that, for an average american - at least in this part of the country -, if you want something to look stylish or modern, you just have to add the ‘european’ component to it - people will immediately associate it with something that has to be cool. even if it’s just a label in the name.