I'm part of a group of five or six friends, who "physically"
get together most weekends (as opposed to virtually). We also
email each other, usually every few days, to generally trade
jokes, share news, and discuss scheduling problems to do with
when we are next getting together. We are starting to talk on
Messenger too. One Monday a few weeks ago, our emailing rate
suddenly spiked to more than thirty emails in about twelve
hours. Unfortunately this was a few days after someone new had
just joined our group. Luckily she didn't flee in terror, and
things calmed down. Things really NEEDED to calm down because
most of the thirty plus emails were coming from a fight between
two of my friends. I'll call them Katrina and Chris. Hopefully,
reading this article won't restart the fight. (If it does I'll
expect an angry email or two saying, 'I won't be coming on
Sunday...or ever again.') Let me repeat. Email is wonderful, if
used right. After the fight cooled down a little, Chris even
mentioned that the nature of sending and receiving emails allows
one to think before you reply, if you take the time.
If someone emails you and says you are an idiot, you can safely
write the scathing reply you want to, full of all manner of the
foulest insults and bad language. I recommend you write just
such a vicious answer. But write it with a word processor
program, rather than directly into a blank email. You get all
kinds of help with spelling, editing, and punctuation. It is
massively embarrassing to get an email saying that you are an
idiot, and then have even one misspelled word in your (meant to
be) derisive reply. The more important reason to write your
reply in a word processor is that you can't click 'send' the
moment you finish writing. You can't fire it off without opening
a new email and then 'cut-and-pasting' your acidic words into
it, which gives you a minute to cool down. Ideally, give
yourself an hour or more to cool down in a situation as this.
After half an hour, reread the email you are responding too. Did
they say 'you are an idiot', or 'you look like an idiot when you
don't spell check'?
If you hadn't guessed already, Katrina and Chris didn't take an
hour, or even a few minutes to cool down before replying to each
others emails. Usually, both are more sensible so maybe they
just had an off-day on the same day. Or, maybe they had real and
genuine complaints about each other that needed to be discussed
and resolved. Regardless of why they did it, they then traded a
series of steadily more insulting emails, replying to each other
without taking time to cool down. Our group received more than
thirty emails. One email somehow got sent to 'undisclosed
recipients', which sparked accusations of bizarre cover ups
involving secretly sharing our private business with mysterious
shadowy strangers. Eventually they took their fight to a more
private level, no longer 'CC'ing their insults to the rest of
us. In this private exchange I think the insults got even more
vicious. No longer getting 'CC'ed emails, from either Chris to
Katrina or Katrina to Chris, I thought that they both had calmed
down and grown up. Then out of the blue, both of them emailed me
offering to drop out of the group. We nearly lost them both
because they couldn't stand to be in the same room together
after what they'd said in their rapid-fire emails. I spent days
talking to them both on Messenger to sort it out. We did even
lose Chris for a few weeks. However, I left the door open for
him to return and eventually he did. Email is a wonderful tool.
But be careful, you can burn your bridges if you don't use it
with a cool head.
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