This morning I happened to annoy my would-be-missus so much that she sent me a stinker of an email threatening me with dire consequences. However, unfortunately (?!) she had used the word “shit” and had sent it from her corporate mailbox to my corporate account, so the email never reached me.
She spent a few minutes of the next few hours wondering why I hadn’t reacted to the stinker of her email, and then decided to concentrate on her work instead, and cooled down in the process. I, completely unaware of the email and the dire consequences it threatened (the mail never reached me), too took a while to cool down, then decided to concentrate on work, and proceeded to attend a series of random presentations.
So when we talked in the evening, all was cool and peaceful with the world. We spent a couple of minutes talking about the non-delivered email, and the events leading up to it, and proceeded to talk about more important things in the world.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I hereby present to you the non-deliverable email. The exact technology I haven’t figured out (and who knows, it might have already been invented, given my luck with these kind of insights) but this is something more foolproof than a corporate email profanity-blocker. This is basically designed for email that you would send in the heat of the moment and then regret later on in life. It is designed to make you think thrice (not by making you solve simple arithmetic, like Google announced with their drunk email policy) before hitting the send button. It is designed to go into some suspense account somewhere in the world, and never reappear.
I think a large portion of (personal) emails that are sent are later regretted by the senders. Ok not a very large proportion but significant enough to make my product a success. So the option of non-deliverable email means whatever you yell out in the heat of the moment (no pun intended) is never heard!
There are two loopholes with this, of course:
1. When you are angry and want to yell at someone by email, you are surely not in the right frame of mind to mark the email as “non-deliverable”. A different mechanism might need to be put in place to make you more discrete
2. Sometimes when I’m angry and send out angry emails, I expect a quick response, else I get angrier. Non-deliverable email would prove counterproductive for people like me. However, I think in the medium to long run it is useful.
However, if this technology comes into place, it would make sense to extend it to text messages also. The immediate reason for the would-be-missus’s annoyance this morning was a series of fitful text messages that I sent her, that I’ve been deeply regretting ever since. If only I had marked those text messages as non-deliverable..