Monday, March 24, 2008

Confessions of an Email Addict

by Judy Gruen (copyright 2008)
For permission to reprint, contact . 

I looked over my shoulder and the coast was clear—I thought. No sooner did I begin indulging my urgent cravings when I was busted.

“Checking email again?” My husband discovered me with my guilty hands on the keyboard.

“Just for a half a minute,” I said, averting my face. “I’m waiting to hear from an editor in New York.”

“It’s 2:30 A.M. in New York. The editor may possibly be sleeping. There’s no easy way to say this, Judy, but your emailing has gotten out of control.”

I opened my mouth to deny it, but it was no use. Not only wasn’t I reading any correspondence from editors, I was reading a junk email with the heading, “Lost Secrets of the Knights Templar Revealed!” My husband handed me a flyer from Emailers Anonymous that posed a lot of buttinsky questions, including these:

Have you ever decided to stop checking email for a whole weekend, but caved in after only 45 minutes?
Do you wish people would mind their own business about your emailing—stop telling you what to do?
Do you tell yourself you can stop checking email any time you want to, even though you incessantly peek at it from your PDA, even when you’re out on a date, or at your kid’s birthday party?
Do you have “blackouts,” forgetting entire days spent in a fog of virtual correspondence and joining in chain emails? 

Anyone who answered “yes” to more than four questions was urged to call a toll-free number immediately. I tossed the flyer aside. “I’ve seen enough,” I said.

“For the sake of our family, you need help,” he said. “You even missed our daughter’s school performance last week. We found you passed out next to the computer. Your hand was clutching the mouse and you were mumbling, ‘I’ve got mail,’ over and over again.”

Two days later, I nervously introduced myself at a local meeting of Emailers Anonymous, a place where you had to surrender any PDAs in your possession to get in.

“Hi, my name is Judy and I’m a compulsive emailer.”

“Hi, Judy!” the crowd welcomed me.

They listened attentively to my story. Like most others, I had started emailing only for professional reasons, checking mail only when necessary. Before I realized what was happening, though, I’d find myself in the supermarket, getting a haircut, or driving carpool, feeling that I had to know—that very minute—how many emails had arrived in my inbox since I left the house. Did I have offers to review books, write articles, enlarge body parts I didn’t possess, or help some clueless Ugandan invest the $10 million his deceased father (the former prime minister) left him? 

Things continued to spiral downward. “I began sneaking away from the dinner table to check email,” I admitted to the fellowship, as they nodded knowingly. “An hour after dinner I’d feel all jumpy until I checked it again. When my husband suggested we go away for the weekend to a remote cabin in the mountains with no internet access, I panicked. That’s when I knew I had hit bottom.”

I felt better after unburdening myself to my new friends. They understood me, and the lurid lure of electronic mail, even the junk. 

The group leader thanked me and then intoned, “Alcoholics have it easy compared to us. All they have to do is swear off booze forever. But we can’t stop using email unless we join an Amish community in Pennsylvania. Frankly, there aren’t enough horses to go around for all of us.”

The Emailers Anonymous system was Draconian: I was only allowed to check email once in the morning and once at the end of the day. That was it! No more cheap thrills passing by the computer and casually pressing the “check email” button. To survive this regimen, I was supposed to call my sponsor, Mary, every day. The first day, I called Mary three times before lunch. 

“I’m having heart palpitations, Mary. What if I have an electronic coupon for a sale at Macy’s that expires in 24 hours? What if I have new friend invitations on Facebook, or a warning about accidentally getting electrocuted by answering my cell phone when it’s charging?”

“Your self-respect is more important than a corporate coupon or bogus internet threat,” Mary counseled. “I have an idea: Why don’t you go out and get a job at Starbucks? You won’t have to answer email there.”

Me? A barista at Starbucks? Didn’t I already spend enough time on kitchen duty around here as it is? Mary’s threat to send me out into the real work world scared me straight. I had to admit, the woman was a genius.

“Remember our motto: It’s one email at a time,” she said. We ended by praying together, adding a special devotional to clog up the brains of the software engineers in Silicon Valley so that they can’t think up any other ways to insinuate email into our daily lives. That was a very satisfying prayer.

Sure, I still have occasional slips, and my chocolate consumption is up, but my garden is also looking perkier, since Mary makes me go out and pull weeds when I’m feeling weak and the chocolate is all gone. Now, only eight hours till I can check my email again. . . 

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