The week there was no email,
Chantel almost killed herself. Later, she would joke about it and
laugh about it with her colleagues. Susan, who worked in the cubicle
next to her, was astounded. "Come on, Chantel, you wouldn't really kill
yourself just because no one emailed you for a week, would you? That's
just ridiculous." Karen cultivated the social gossip at the water
cooler every day and she offered, "I wish I could go a week without
email. I hate weeding through that junk." Another one, Sam, who fixes
the copier when it breaks down, added, "What did you do before email?"
There was no life before email. Although Chantel played along with
them, and even made detrimental remarks on her own sanity in order to
feed the laughter, inside her head, she was, indeed, quite serious. Her
lifeline had somehow come to rely on short missives on her computer
from family and acquaintances. Friends might be too strong a word. She
didn't really have friends, just acquaintances. An empty inbox was some
sort of coded message: she wasn't important. She wasn't needed. It had
come to the point where she was now finding herself reading Spam, just
to convince herself that someone out there was trying to communicate
with her, even if the garbled words did come from some computer farm
somewhere in the world. And so the week with no email was traumatic and
it was only later that Chantel even thought to look behind her
computer. That was when she realized that an Ethernet wire had come
undone -- it just dangled there like a noose -- and she had been
physically disconnected from the world the whole time. She breathed a
sigh of relief as a flood of messages entered into her inbox, giving
her a sense of relief not felt in many days.
