NO EMAIL, NO BIG DEAL

Our office is now five weeks and counting without email. Well, not totally; most of the time it's down, but some of the time, it's up briefly and then shuts down. something about a mail server filling up and then not being accessible.

For someone like me who lives on email, it's been a test of my patience. I have failed miserably. Were it not for my dislike of cleaning up messes or buying new stuff, I would have thrown many things in my office up against a wall. Instead, I quietly seethe.

Last week, after yet another person called me to ask why I hadn't responded to their email or gotten back to them on something they'd invited me to by email, I told them our email was down 98% of the time. I described to him how it reminded me of my two weeks in Albania in 1994, when the village in which I was living had running water for one hour a day: 4am to 5am. So we put a big tub underneath the faucet, left the faucet on, and then woke up the next morning to see one hour's worth of water in the tub -- all the water we'd have to use that day for bathing, washing clothes, and boiling for drinks.

After I told that story, though, I thought a bit about how relatively insignificant it is that I have no email. Sure, business and personal communications have been thrown asunder. But I was reminded that most of the people in the world lack steady access to something more important: running water. I thought of all of the water I'd used in the past five weeks -- heck, in the past five hours -- without which my life would truly have been inconvenienced.

Maybe being without email isn't so bad, if you put it in the perspective that I'm fortunate enough to be in the minority of the earth's inhabitants that can flush a toilet, take a shower, do a load of laundry, and wash my hands. I still hope for our email services to return. But maybe I'll be a little more patient now.