The server that manages my email acts like the woman at the telephone switchboard in days of yore, or the solitary signal man directing trains on multiple tracks in the early 1900's. To avoid crashes or missed calls, those overlapping voices and locomotives had to be managed. Now the jobs are obsolete.
Recently the email that is destined for my inbox has been waylaid. Not all of it, but one portion has disappeared into the land of misfit messages. John has delved into the morass trying to uncover the reason, but as yet he has not succeeded. I do not know for sure how many emails I missed, because it is hard to notice what is not there. Neither can I quantify the letters I composed to other people that have been DOA.
Communicating with people is a constant for many of us, whether it is written, digital or in person. Maybe we assume our words were received when they were not, and conversely sometimes meaning arrives unsupervised. Robert Frost said the "The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended."
There is a joke about a husband who thinks it is odd that his wife begins a conversation with these words:
"Did you hear anything I said?"
Having a chunk of conversation wannabes go the way of the phone call when the switchboard woman accidentally yanked the wrong jack, has jacked up my appreciation for the ones that got through. It strikes me as miraculous that we manage to hear each other as often as we do.
