The email inbox is full. It’s been full for days, weeks. It no longer belongs to me but rather to gremlins who red highlight posts to send me back to check and see if I need to do something. I do. I don’t want to. A big sigh escapes.
If, indeed, gremlins have taken over, perhaps I might name them: Sleepy, Grumpy, Stalled, and George, stubborn in his tracks. You’ll note I have not given the gremlins female names. Girls, no doubt, would have plowed in, made brief comments or funny emoji faces, sent them off, and deleted. But then, girls have memories. Elders do not. I am an elder. Bertha. There. Maybe I’ll name a gremlin Bertha.
I mean, how does this happen? I unsubscribe and unsubscribe and they keep on coming. No doubt somewhere, like in the cloud where all my interests and email and writing and wondering go, there’s this sub-head gremlin who pours over my writing, sees what I’m most interested in or NOT, and then, just to amuse this very dissatisfied gremlin, maybe George, he resubscribes me and then finds in the tendrils of electronic news, views, and highlights, corresponding threads and hooks me up.
This is not the sort of hook-up we talked about when young.
I don’t think the head gremlin does this. It’s the underlings. The head gremlin is called Mephistopheles, probably, and about the size of the King Gremlin in Lord of the Rings. That big fat guy with the crown on his head. He doesn’t care. He just sits and lets others feed him. Like this rant. They’ll probably feed him this rant.
And he’ll laugh and he’ll laugh. Ho ho ho ho.
And my inbox will get even fuller.
janetsunderland.com 
I so completely understand. And share your angst. And ponder how technology and this wondrous cyberworld that allows us to be “connected” has added another essential but unfulfilling task to our lives…. glad you wrote about it. : )
“…essential but unfulfilling task…” Well said, Ellen. Thank you. And, along with all the other stuff, it’s political time! Yikes. I am grateful for the red delete X.
Thanks, Ellen. I think what I’ve done, in these last throes of revising this way too long memoir, is use my blog as a rant. I ranted. LOL. So nice to be in touch with you.
I sympathize with you, Janet. I swear that the act of unsubscribing to an email turns it into some kind of Zombie that will not go away. Lately I have started to unsubscribe from an email and then mark it as junk. If I see my Junk file filling up during the day I open it and check to see if there is anything worth saving, or perhaps mistakenly identified as junk. At that point I go up to the top of the menu and “Erase Junk”.
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What a good idea Allan. I’ll try that. Thank you. You are a font of useful information.
I hope that it works for you.
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Now I just have to remember….. 🙂
I’m laughing because my first VW bug — a green one — was named for Mephistopheles. I called him Meffie for short.
I sympathize with your inbox travails. Actually, the only time I really deal with it is after I’ve been gone. Even a weekend can do it, but four or five days? Oh, my.
The good news is that I don’t get the forwards and spam and all of that. Of course, I’ve been quite spare in my subscribing. I do like email subscriptions to blog posts, because it’s far more convenient than the reader or any of the feed systems. If an announcement of a post still is in the inbox, I know I haven’t read it. And off I go!
So far, so good, on the political front. I avoid those people like the plague. And thank goodness I only have one cousin who does the forwarding business: the ones with the YOU MUST READ THIS NOW!!!!! heading.
Thankfully I don’t have any of the YOU MUST READ in my feed. I think, all in all, I’ve gone and got myself waaaaay to involved in too many things, especially being on the board of a small literary press. And that’s been over six years and the info has piled up in a draconian way. Thank you for reading my rant.
And although my political fervor has lessened as I’ve aged, I’m the recipient of way too many campaign emails and robo calls!
Here’s what I wrote to my sister: Could the Democratic overload posts lighten up a little? I mean, the world is nuts but we’re not as close to disaster as so many seem to imply. It’s going to be a long year……
I think my inbox is terrorized by a relative of yours. I just unsubscribed from having my WordPress notifications sent to my email box. Why I ever did that is beyond me, but hopefully I’ll have gotten rid of a pile of emails. We’ll see.
janet
hahahahaha. It’s a big family!
This is GREAT——love the idea that it’s not just me!!!
Okay. Now the gremlins have moved here. I thought I’d responded and maybe this is a copy of the response I’d already written, but maybe not.
Anyway. No. You are NOT alone. Could the Democratic overload posts lighten up a little? I mean, the world is nuts but we’re not as close to disaster as so many seem to imply. It’s going to be a long year……