A farewell to email
For those of you who are confused and thrown off by all these new words here on the main page, let me explain by saying that I did not plan to update the site today. I got all comfortable in my office chair to go through email but soon realized that I can't for reasons that I will detail below. So, rather than do something else, I figured I might as well throw a new post up.
Luckily I won't have to deal with these email woes anymore because I hereby renounce electronic mail. Unfortunately I'm awful at talking on the phone (who knew that was something you could be bad at) and am too lazy to write letters, so I think that leaves smoke signals and the telegraph for future correspondence. I know, it sounds inefficient and possibly dangerous, but once you hear the events of the past week you will agree that I really need to just give up on this whole email thing:
MONDAY
My friend T. BCC'd me on an email she'd sent to a girl who used to be a friend of mine. They'd recently had a falling out and T. wanted to get my input on her response to Former Friend. I gave her my very, very honest opinion and hit Send. But something didn't feel right. So I checked my Outbox right before the note was about to be sent. Ah, yes. I had replied to all. So that could have been, uh, really bad.I went to investigate how this could have happened. After all, I don't usually make stupid mistakes like that. I quickly found that I no longer have a Reply button in Outlook. Seriously. How does a Reply button just disappear? The fact that the Reply to All button is now in its place is setting me up for some serious social conflict.
TUESDAY
I check my Qurb spam folder and sift through 817 spams to try to catch any legitimate emails. Unless friends have started emailing me about Cialis and girls who like to **** **** in the ********* it was all spam. I go to my computer two hours later to find that I have 280 new spam emails. I also get a voicemail from someone I met at a social event who'd emailed me but never heard back, her email obviously lost in the depths of my Qurb folder.Meanwhile, most people using Hotmail, MSN and some other carriers don't get email from me at all. My main email account is on a blacklist ever since a spammer used it as his reply-to address a few months ago.
WEDNESDAY
I wake up to 593 new spam emails. I email J. to whine about this but my email won't send. I check my Outbox to see that none of my emails have been sent since Monday night. I immediately start cursing my server and start to investigate what the problem is.After torturing my server for hours trying to get my email to send I realize that it is not an issue with my server at all. I then blame my laptop. Nothing works. I slam my fist onto the keyboard in frustration and dislodge the Shift key. Meanwhile, I can still receive email so I communicate with J. by writing him messages using the "Tell A Friend" feature for Buttafly articles. So all my emails to him have the subject "Jennifer has sent you an article from Buttafly.com!"
THURSDAY
About 3,000 Google searches later I determine that SBC has prevented me from sending email from non-SBC accounts. It's a free feature that comes with their DSL package called "Surprise! We Started Blocking Port 25 and Didn't Tell You About It!"I dig out my last bill and call the 800 number for tech support. An automated message tells me that the number has been changed to a 900 number and it will cost $19 to call it. I curse SBC and vow to switch to cable as soon as possible but decide to go ahead and pay the ridiculous fee to get them to stop blocking the port on my account. After one ring I hear a garbled recording of some music and a woman talking in a low, husky voice. I decide I like the new ambiance of the tech support line. Nice touch. As usual I'm tuning out what she's saying and just waiting to hear what number I need to push if I'm using Windows. But then I hear something about "pleasure" and "fantasies" and realize that I am probably not on the phone with SBC. So, $19 later, I see that I transposed the last two digits of SBC's 800 number.
Anyway, I'll spare you the rest of the story since it just involves a lot of listening to hold music and trying to understand SBC tech support over a patchy connection to India just to have them tell me I can't make that request over the phone. But I think that you will all agree that I am just not meant to use email anymore.
Meanwhile, until I get set up with smoke signals or carrier pigeons or something, those of you who know me might want to keep me off emails sent to multiple recipients for a while since my tendency to talk smack doesn't mix well with the new placement of my Reply to All button.
Ringtones reach a new low
I have stated in the past that I'm not the biggest fan of ringtones for cell phones. But there's a new Sir Mix-A-Lot tone out that I have mixed emotions about.
Unfortunately for Mix-A-Lot, cell phone users, and the human race in general, I do not mean that the ringtone simply plays the tune of one of his songs. No, it plays him rapping new lyrics to the tune of Baby Got Back that he wrote specifically for the ringtone. It begins, "You want this call and you cannot lie."
Man, times are hard when the only airplay you can get is on some idiot's Nokia 3600. That's just really depressing. Will he include these pieces in his live performances? "And now here's one I wrote for the Sanyo MM7400..."
If there's a silver lining here it's that perhaps there is a future for Ashlee Simpson's catalogue of work after all. And maybe other '90s flame-outs like Gerardo and EMF can reunite and put together some new songs that talk about incoming calls.
I don't know, I'm reaching here. It's just so depressing.
The one New Year’s Resolution I can remember
So I wrote down some New Year’s Resolutions while having a margarita with my husband last week but now I can’t find them and can’t remember what they were. I guess “be more responsible” wasn’t one of them.
A pretty safe guess was that one of them probably involved losing weight, since that’s what I have been vowing to do every new year (OK, every week) since I was 16. Although back then I was just upset about that extra five pounds that I could never seem to shed. Now that I’ve had a baby and the weight isn’t exactly falling off like it’s supposed to after your first child it’s more like twenty five pounds. So when we get back to Austin (we’re currently in Houston) I’m going to start my own modified version of the South Beach Diet. I modified it because I don’t eat fake food – no egg substitute, nonfat cheese and faux butter for me. It should be interesting since my willpower has been at an all-time low lately. I had a big lunch at Katz’s this afternoon and then just got back from an Italitan restaurant where I did my impression of Jabba the Hutt.
On a related note, I may never update this blog again because I have discovered the wonderful world of weight loss blogs. In fact I may never do anything again. For some reason I am fascinated with shows, blogs, or any other documentation of weight loss that involves before and after pictures. I never cease to be amazed at how much a person’s weight impacts every aspect of their life.
OK, I need to wrap up this post because I can’t think. I apologize if any part of this post has been incoherent. I am at my mother-in-law’s house in Houston. She recently took in an elderly friend who needed some help as well as her two cats. So it’s me, J., the baby, his mom, her cat, her friend and her two cats all in a 1,200 sq. ft. house with Everybody Loves Raymond reruns being played at full volume about eight feet away from me. Not exactly a silent bastion of concentration.