Email Therapy

I have a new job. I posted an ad on Craigslist a little over a week ago under the heading "writing tutor." So this girl/woman calls me up and says she needs help writing an email. But actually, it wasn't so much writing as she needed an appropriately witty/snappy/flirty response to a witty/snappy/flirty email a guy had sent her, accepting a dinner invitation.

So here's what we did. She sent me the email and all the previous emails leading up to it. Then I called her the next day and we talked about it and how she knew the guy, etc. She was really grateful for my help. But since I didn't really consider it writing tutoring, I decided I wouldn't charge her. She said it could totally be a new line of work for me, though.

Turns out she is a businesswoman and she is into "commodities." I decided to ask her opinion as to how much I could charge on the market for a "commodity" like email consultation. She said around $25-30 is what she would pay. I figured that would be fair. So I put a new ad on Craigslist.

I think it's really good timing, too. NPR online has had two stories recently about our cultural bombardment with email. There was one recently about "family spam" and just today a story about how people are just inundated with emails to the point of frustration, here. According to their numbers, about 210 billion emails are sent a day, and increasing from there.

Not only that, it's this amorphous type of communication that is both specific and nonspecific. Personal and impersonal. It can convey a lot of information in just a few words, or it can go on forever, saying nothing. A friend of mine just told me about how she had a huge blowup with another good friend of hers over email. She was all upset that she had to cut the friend off and send her out of her life. But when the friend came back from out of the country, they had a chance meeting, and everything was fine. It was all a misunderstanding, and speaking for a few seconds face to face cleared everything up.

I think it's like that all the time. We're victims and email is the perpetrator. That's why it needs to be under control. It's like too much of a good thing if you overdo it. The problem is, it's too easy to overdo it, and so many people do, all the time, because it's so hard to know when you're sitting at a computer screen, exactly how your words are going to be received on the other end, because there is no way to convey tone. But we think there is. So most of the time you think you are saying one thing, but it gets interpreted entirely differently. Then there is a lot of backtracking and it just gets to be a big mess.

That's why I'm happy to be an email therapist. I want to save people from email destruction.

Epilogue: After the man accepted her dinner offer and made flirtatious comments, the woman sent a fairly innocuous email (after my consultation with her), suggesting a date. She missed the text message the guy sent her in the mean time. He said he had a girlfriend and didn't want to send the wrong message by "being alone" with her. I thought that was creepy. I said she should keep her distance. No more flirting.

But was he flirting or wasn't he? Maybe he didn't think so. But he was sending the wrong message to her, in my view. I advised her to keep it simple.

So that's my story. Seriously. Call me before you send that email.

Oh, and text messaging. That's a mine field worse than email. And that's a whole other story. That will be my next line of work.