You've Got Mail

She grabs the remote for her new light up terrarium night light she got for her birthday and then says to me "I'm checking my email!".

Then it dawned on me that she will probably not even know what email is by the time she gets to use computers or phones on the regular.

Back in the day there was even a movie based around email. We had ringtones and screensavers. We had pre-microsoft HOTMAIL. We had rich princes wanting our help with their fortunes.

Email was big. We communicated a lot over email. We made plans, applied for jobs and shared recipes and bad jokes all though email. We probably arranged meeting up to see the email movie through email.

Life was simpler then. You could call or email. Or leave a message. That's it

Now you have to have all the apps and their own proprietary messaging systems installed so that you can communicate with all your peeps. Something about blue bubbles and green bubbles not being compatible makes my head hurt.

She won't know what a big deal Gmail was in the day and that getting an invite was like getting an invite to the royal ball. 1GB of storage was mind blowing. Last I counted, I have 13,000 unread emails in my inbox. I have no idea what that takes up as storage and nor do I care. But, I can go back and look. I can find the emails BW and I sent when we were dating. Try and find a 13 year old text message from some long abandoned app from Google.

There used to be a sound when you got email. Email was cool. Email was the future. You could communicate with somebody around the world! It was unthinkable!

Now, my inbox is full of Amazon wanting to sell me something, or breaking news about more bad news – and that's just no reason to get excited about email any more - which is a shame.

I want an email I look forward to. One that's entertaining or makes you think or at least gives you a minute of reprieve from the world around you.

Here's hoping this email is one of the good emails you get today.