Inboxes

I missed a deadline.

Not just any deadline, a serious deadline.

The kind of deadline that caused panic in the streets and inured me with the title "Jerk-Ass of the Week"

How did I miss this deadline?

Glad you asked.

I missed this deadline because I forgot to check my personal work email inbox on a friday afternoon. And then again on Saturday morning. And then again on Saturday afternoon.

I checked my Facebook seventy-two times in the same 24 hours.

I checked my work email fourteen times.

I checked my personal email ten times.

I checked my blog at least five times looking for comments.

I checked my iTunes sales once. (The Australians are streaming!, the australians are streaming!)

I may have checked my myspace twice. I can't remember.

I don't twitter. But if I did, I would have. I did send five texts to my wife. Three of which were too dirty to share and the other two something about picking up wine and returning videos to Blockbuster.

I did not, however, check my personal work email. This is the separate email account I have at my place of business so that I can communicate sensitive material. So it is possible to be both obsessive and non-commital in the same breath.

Why did I not check this one? No idea. Just plain forgot. Well, maybe sub-consciencely I ignore it because it never has anything but spam and bad news, but that's a whole 'nuther uncomfortable conversation.

And the deadline; same dead line; every third week of the month; I have had for over two years.

So not only did I not check my email. I lost an entire week. Which is a much bigger problem than has been dreamt of in my philosophy.

Checking inboxes has an evil twin however. My boss's boss once referred to the inbox as the almighty Time Suck. Inboxes, email accounts, and social networking can very easily drain hours out of a clearly mapped out calendar. I've tried replacing my smoking habit with the inbox addiction, but alas, those monkeys play nicely together.

Although great danger and responsibility lies within the immediacy of connectivity, this revolution leads us to a new social zen.

The Life-Work-Inbox Balance.

So today, I reinvest my time.

I get in, check my mail. I go to lunch then check my mail. I map out the last 13 minutes of my day so that I can check my mail and still have at least ten minutes to deal with whatever problem may arise, or even better, tell someone that I only have nine minutes left in my day and there's no way I can run to the rescue. I get home, kiss my wife, yell at my kids, I do some light dusting to prepare for a party tonight, pour myself a half glass of zin, and sit down to check my inboxes. I will only do this while the pasta boils.

But there it was.

A message from a dear old friend.

His beautiful baby daughter was born premature and is in and out of the ICU.

And what was supposed to be a silly blog becomes something else entirely. Suddenly, a connectivity rant, a joke on the yin and yang of the computer age, escalates into a personal plea to the universe to bring a friend's life back into balance.

I once told a buddy that the real change from being a man to being a daddy is courage. You always think that you'll step in front of a bullet, you think you could run into a busy street, you're pretty sure you could kill a bad guy with your bare hands,

but when you become a dad,

you know.

So my friend doesn't need courage. He's got that.

He probably needs sleep more than a phone call, and I'm too far away to do some light pick-up around the house and cook some soup.

I don't believe in God. But I do believe in prayer.

Amen.

And thanks to a little click of the mouse, I can send all the love and good vibes that I've been saving for myself.

All the love and good vibes any man could respectably handle.

And it is his for the taking.

Whenever he gets around to checking his inbox.