"Dear Kevin, - Thank you for pre-registering for e-XPO. Along with your free preview magazine your admission badge is printed below. . .Also attached is your car park voucher for presenting to the RDS car park attendant. . ."
Thank you for pre-registering for what? I had done no such thing. I would as soon register for something like eXPO ("Windows World Computing Solutions") as I would take a sun holiday in downtown Freetown or clear a North Korean minefield by imitating a Roscommon garda killing ants. Though that's not entirely true. I might be tempted to seek admission, if only to sprinkle a little anthrax or pneumonic plague amongst the exhibitors as they babbled away to one another in Compu-persian or whatever it is these people speak.
New language
Now, admittedly, I am grateful to Bill Gates for inventing the technology which enables me to work so often from home; but I have as much desire to know how it works as I have to understand the cycles of a washing machine or how a television channel changer works. No-one asks us to master an entirely new language merely because we turned on the Electrolux or the telly; but in this messianic world of Gatesonia, we are expected to speak in tongues and, wild of eye, to corner strangers and tell them of "three externalised localisation solutions to easily translate any web application."
No, I didn't make that up: I couldn't. Not possibly. It's the actual name of one of the papers at e-XPO; and let me here break the bad news gently. You missed it. It's over. Took place the other day, and you weren't there. How utterly heart-breaking. And now you'll never know what the three externalised solutions to easily translate any web application actually are. Pity.
But it's not the invasion of Compu-persian and its compuseepages into the English language - I still maintain that dot-com is the last thing that happened to Dorothy Parker before she went to sleep every night - which I mind most. For just as medieval monks could mellifluously converse in Latin, no matter what marauding Vikings were babbling to one another, I can ignore the new linguistic intrusions slouching through the English language - web sights, y qu'homme, softwear and seedy discs.
But what I cannot ignore is the e-mail. For almost every time I get my home computer to dial into the Irish Times computer, I am told I have an incoming message; and for political reasons I must - as we compu-types put it - access the message, just in case it's the Editor or the Chairman volunteering to do a few odd jobs around the place for me. I like to stay in touch - in these days of crippling labour shortages, one has to keep one's domestics sweet, the creatures.
Jammed
But the moment I open my messages-received file, with my replies prepared - why of course, Editor dear, you may come and do a bit of weeding in the garden; but naturally, Chairman, my splendid fellow, you may give the saucepans a good Brillo-ing, and polish the car when you're finished, why don't you? - than I find my computer is jammed with incoming e-mails from outside, pouring into it like passengers on a sinking ship scrambling onto the lifeboats.
And one characteristic of many of these messages, which infest every nook and cranny of my computer like cockroaches in a banana ship, is their perfectly Olympian arrogance. One certain e-mailer recently wrote from Greece that she had heard "on good authority" - shorthand for never buying The Irish Times - that I knew about Irish soldiers who fought in the second World War. Her daughter was doing a school thesis on this very subject, but was running out of time. Would I therefore write down all I knew and send it to her as soon as possible?
The p-word, apparently didn't exist for her then or later in her follow-up communication two weeks later regally demanding that I get my dotting finger out of the dot-com because the daughter was running out of dot time. Spin on dot, I declared to the ether and, like a king squashing a cockroach, I exterminated the message, without even sending a dot reply (not least because I didn't know how to).
Nearly as appalling are the many earnest communications, several thousand words long, thoughtfully and in detail rebutting arguments I might have cobbled together in a few moments of pre-deadline and wildly panicked illogicality, and politely asking me to reply to all 743 points they have made. A full reply is as likely as advice on making a bomb.
Short shrift
So. E-mails, plea-mails, even fe-mails will get shorter shrift than phone calls or letters, though it's true I tend not to be in when the phones ring, and equally true that I tend to mislay incoming missives. Ah, well. It's all a matter of organisation, the lack of which (combined with an utterly fetching modesty) explains why I never keep a copy of my columns.
Which brings me to my last point. A certain company is keen to publish a selection of my columns, but since I have written an awful lot of them over the years, it's not easy to judge the most popular. If you happen to remember any you enjoyed, would you be good enough to let me know? Only, not by e-mail. Just to me, Ballymore Eustace, Co Kildare, will do very nicely, indeed.
