Saturday, March 28, 1998

Our dot com boy gets shocking surprise

By Bob Greene

I was blithely cruising along in my new incarnation as dot com boy, happy to be hitching a ride on the worldwide computer network on my own terms, when the shocking news hit me like an asteroid out of the blue.

As readers of this column are aware, I am fiercely resistant to the concept of new technology. My own idea of newspaper work has always been rooted in the romance of the old "a man, a pencil and a train ticket" credo -- i.e., those three things are all you need to go out and report a story.

The computer age left me cold. So last year, when I was informed I was now dot com boy -- that the column was being made available worldwide at www.chicago.tribune.com/go/greene -- I was skittish and reticent and taciturn. I didn't want to be dot com boy. I wanted to be on the train with my pencil.

But soon enough I reluctantly conceded the dot com world has its advantages -- that the worldwide computer network, when it works properly, is probably the greatest delivery system for newspapers ever invented, sort of like a planetary paperboy assigned to toss the morning edition onto the global front stoop. It was actually quite impressive.

The one thing in which I maintained my stubborn pride, though, was that I didn't have e-mail.

I'm a believer in stationery and ink and post offices and people putting their thoughts down on paper. People licking stamps with their own tongues. The built-in lag time that comes with sending letters through the mail -- the way letters compel people to think a little harder about what they want to say and whether they want to say it at all. The way letters are tactile.

So whenever anyone asked how to send me e-mail, I would quickly reply, "You can't. I don't have it." When they asked me when I would get it, I would say, "Never. I'll never have it."

I thought having or not having e-mail was the symbolic dividing line, even for a dot com boy. If you didn't have e-mail, you were still a human being. Once you did, you were an electronic creature, with glowing tubes and microchips and hard drives where your vital organs ought to be.

Then, a few weeks ago, I was talking on the phone with Mike Tackett of my newspaper's Washington bureau. He asked me how he could e-mail me something, and I said -- as always -- "You can't. I don't have e-mail."

Tackett, who has known me for years, said, "You're a moron. You have it. You're just too stupid to know it."

He gave me some tips about where to go in order to assure myself he was right.

Here's the short version: He was right.

I had e-mail. In fact, I have probably had it for a year or so. I had no idea.

When I first opened it up, it was a staggering sight. There were letters from all over the world, letters I had never seen. There were letters from my bosses -- letters to which I hadn't responded because I didn't know they were there. The list scrolled and scrolled and scrolled.

But that's not the bad part. The bad part is ... You know those stories you read in the paper sometimes, about postal workers who've gone wacky and stashed sacks and sacks of undelivered letters in a trunk or an attic somewhere?

That was me -- only I did it to myself, to the letters that were written to me, and almost all of them were gone. The seemingly endless list of e-mail letters in my computer only went back one month. As best as I can determine from asking the right computer people here, there were probably thousands upon thousands of letters I received before that, letters that simply got deleted -- they came into my computer without my knowing it, they sat around until some pre-set time limit expired and were excised. All those "I don't have e-mail" statements of mine, and I actually did. And the letters vanished, unread.

How did my correspondents know my e-mail address? I have no idea. I didn't even know my address. One of the remaining letters was from Jaynie Dinkelaker, whom I went to high school with in Ohio, and whom I haven't talked to in 30 years. Jaynie Dinkelaker, who lives in Tucson, knew my e-mail address and wrote me. She knew my address, and I didn't.

This doesn't mean I have to like it. This doesn't mean I have to be a part of it. I may be dot com boy, but I'm still dot com boy with a pencil, looking for a metal mailbox out the window of the train. This is the part of a story -- the last paragraph -- after which newspapers often put little italic lines listing the writers' e-mail addresses. But I know my bosses have far too much respect and affection for me to do such a thing against my wishes. They would never ignore my expressed desires and do that, for which I thank them very much.

E-mail: BGreene@tribune.com.

Chicago Tribune