Alligator Makes Me Mend My Ways
I used to believe with all my heart that being fast was good. I liked fast cars and like to drive fast. Just check my police record and you will see just how much I like fast. In high school I didn’t necessarily like the idea that a girl could have a fast reputation, but I like that these girls never lacked for a date and really wore some of the greatest looking trashy clothes I have ever lusted after. I even like some of the meal-in-a-box type food that you can cook really fast in a microwave. But as of today I am changing my ways. I don’t like fast anymore.
I was checking my e-mail this morning, as I do every morning. When I got to one of the 5 accounts I try to manage, I saw that I had accumulated 85 pieces of e-mail in my Bulk e-mail folder. Bless the heart of the person who created spam filters. By employing this particular invention my e-mail services automatically puts the junk in the Bulk folder. By comparison I have 865 e-mails in my In-box. And this, after checking all of these folders at 10 p.m. last night. It’s 3:30 a.m. now.
My routine is to first delete all the Bulk e-mails, and then move on to read the really good e-mails in my In-box. Deleting the Bulk stuff has never been of any concern to me. After all, the Bulk e-mails are only moved to the Deleted folder, where I can go and look for them at anytime. I was way past the middle of my morning e-mail routine this morning and had just finished reading a story from one of the writers who belongs to one of the same groups I belong to. I have to confess I have not been writing much of late. Oh, it’s not that I don’t have anything to write about, just none of my topics / subjects / mishaps of life strike me as funny. I have been making notes about these things, but have been unable to put them into story or column form. Anyway, I had just finished reading this story about one of the writer’s adventures into the realm of self-do hair coloring and was still unable to regain any sense of composure. I’m going to use her story as scapegoat in my story. After all I still had tears of laughter in my eyes when I saw that once again I have e-mail in my Bulk folder.
Before leaving my e-mail and moving on to life outside
e-mail, I clicked over to the Bulk folder to remove the new offending mail.
While wiping tears from my eyes I clicked to put the little ‘x’ in
the box to the left of the offending e-mail. Wiped my eyes so I could see
clearly and then immediately clicked the big DELETE button at the top. In that
infamous ‘oh shit’ nanosecond between ‘click’ and
‘I think I’m going to die’, I caught a glimpse of possibly
the best e-mail I will receive today. In the subject line I saw
‘alligator holds 3 hostage on school bus’. I was held by fear for just a second and
then remembered that I could find it in the Trash folder. I hurriedly clicked
over to that box, scanned the e-mails there, which by the way I didn’t
recognize, but did not find the alligator. It was only then that I noticed the
WARNING at the top of the page – ‘Messages in your Trash folder are subject to deletion at any
time’.
I sent my e-mail server type people an e-mail. “Ok, dear e-mail server people. I understand the need to keep the servers clean but why out of the 85 e-mails I sent to the trash today did you leave all the rest and remove the alligator? Do you realize this is probably the one thing that could spark my mind back to creativity? Can I have it back, pretty, pretty, please?” They have not replied.
I searched the internet to find out about the alligator subject who must surely have been hunted by Cops or at least hunted by the Wayward Animal Patrol, but to no avail. The story of the alligator must be something akin to national security. There are no stories to be found on the internet about this alligator or the current fate of the 3 hostages.