Uh hi, what are you doing here?
Mom, Dad, geez, most of my friends are here.
Shouldn’t you all be at work 3000 miles away?
Anne, why are all these people here? It’s not my birthday.
My email? Yeah, I just checked it a few minutes ago. I didn’t see anything about this.
What do you mean how often do I check it? I don’t know, a few times a day?
Well I do have my email program running all day, so I guess it’s checking for me every few minutes.
OK, yeah so I check it sometimes anyway when I’m waiting for something else, but it’s cool.
No, I don’t think I check it too much. I’m totally in control of it. I don’t have to check it, I just like to. I can stop anytime I want.
Well yeah, I have been doing this for a few years, but so is everyone else, right? It’s just email, you know. It’s not like I’m obsessively refreshing web pages.
Well thanks, I care about you all too.
What do you mean I have to stop? I don’t think it affects my life at all. I need it to work. I’m not hurting anyone.
I’m gonna go check …, uh, it’s been great to see you all, but I’m really busy with the holidays and all and I’m sure you all need to catch your flights.
Anne, would you ask them to leave?
Look, I already told you, it’s not a problem! This is ridiculous! Get out of my way, I’m leaving!

(Two days later)

Hi, my name is Jeff, and I’m addicted to email.
It started just as a fun way to relax, you know, to be “cool”.
I think my personality lends itself to this kind of thing. When I was a kid, I would check the postal mail for fun. Of course I didn’t get much mail as a kid. Now I don’t even bother with postal mail. It just doesn’t do anything for me anymore.
At first it was just some local BBSes you know, a few messages here and there. And then I started doing BITNET and exploring a whole new world. Soon, I was experimenting with several accounts, but I kept it pretty simple — all terminal-based stuff like ‘mail’ and ‘pine’ or whatever.
Then I went to college and met some people who were into some different stuff: POP, IMAP, Eudora and procmail. That was some great stuff. I got into a lot of mailing lists around then and I really liked it.
I guess what does it for me is the rush of “send and recieve” – the anticipation of all the possibilities of what I could be about to read. What’s news and what’s spam. Has my order shipped? Who found my cache? Are hard drives on sale?
Email leads to web pages and then to more email. It just feeds on itself.
Soon I got into making my own email filters and I found I needed more and more email.
I got into custom email after that, getting my own vanity domains like boulter.com.
I spent days analyzing spam and writing filters to handle it. I got into some new stuff like hotmail, yahoo mail, web mail, AOL, and checking it on my phone.
Often I’m checking it while doing other things. I have the laptop and the wireless connection in the living room, and often I’d take a hit while watching TV. Half the time I can’t remember what the show was about.
Yeah, I have checked it while driving.
Currently, I’m on Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple Mail. On the backend I’ve got fetchmail doing POP and Mail::Audit. They’re all pretty powerful.
A couple of days ago, all my friends and relatives just showed up at my house to talk about my ‘problem’ and now I’m here.
Well I think that’s my story. I’m looking forward getting ‘disconnected’ once and for all, so I can get back to living a normal life. You know, going outside and other places out of wireless range. I just feel so guilty.