Media Flaws

Having pushed procrastination beyond dilatoriness, I now sit here, facing an inbox with 70-odd unread emails. I’m not going to read them. I refuse. Simply because I can only read “Please remove my name from your list!” so many times before I get bored.

It was a blisteringly scorching 38 degree Thursday afternoon. 3 minutes before the hour of 2pm - when an “[Events-hum-l] Subscription” email notification assumed prime position in the centre of my 14 inch decrepit screen. It read as follows:

Dear subscriber,
This is a new emailing list for the humanities faculty which will keep you informed of events you might be interested in. If you do not wish to be on this list, please say so on a return email and your name will be removed.

And that’s when all hell broke loose. Within minutes I found out that staff there and wherever were quite keen to delist. Now as these replies came barraging into my inbox methought I’d erred and started erratically searching through my mailing list for the first few informal divorce plea respondents. Nope. Not on any of my lists.

“REMOVE ME!”

“I DON’T WANT TO BE ON YOUR LIST!”

“AWAY!”

At some stage I decided to take a back seat, buy a Stoney, watch smokers smoke outside as the pop-ups of remove-mes starting marching in a royal procession manner. Each time taking centre stage of screen as I tried to get work done. Having watched smokers smoke I then figured that when you hit reply to this email it replies to all on that list. So your gripe or lack of interest in hum events is aired publicly. Now surely, if I, not the rocket scientist, spotted this trend and opted not to reply many more would have reached that conclusion as well.  Or at least after the 30th ‘REMOVE ME!’ – it should have dawned that if you hit ‘reply’ you perpetuate the cycle. Mh-mm. Speaking of which I haven’t received a new one today. It must have dawned. Now wait till hum-events sends an apology and everyone starts:

"Apology accepted!"

"It's fine!"

etcetera, etcetera...