Gmail is Down
Speaking of the Internet, apparently there is a worldwide outage of Gmail at the moment. Even knowing that no one else has email either, therefore people will be generally understanding for why you haven’t responded to a particular message, this thought fills me with dread, even more so than the Blackberry outage this past fall where I couldn’t access email while away from the computer. There is something unnerving about having the option to communicate taken away vs. my own choice. There is something very different about not turning on email vs. email not functioning.
There should be a name for this type of anxiety.
It made me think about which emails I would miss the most if I couldn’t access them. My first emails with Josh before and after our first date? The one from Steve Jobs? Random ones that I’ve starred and kept to reread whenever I’m feeling down?
Which emails would you miss the most?
10 comments
Ones with photos from folks that I havent saved… 🙁 But I agree! I’m kind of having a little anxiety fit over here. I want my email!!!
Apparently, I live a very relaxed life. I wouldn’t have known that gmail was down if you hadn’t said so. Of course, on the other hand, I have had many days over the last year of “Server is down, can’t do anything” at work. It’s mildly frustrating, but then again, it frees up my time to do more entertaining stuff!
I don’t know how much I would miss any email – I tend to initiate email communications, so if I don’t send one, I don’t get any.
my husband and I met online so our initial correspondence was email. I would miss those. I am sad to this very day that I didn’t have the presence of mind to print of our profiles from the dating site, to remember what first sparked our interest in each other.
I have Gmail but I don’t really use it. I get & store most of my e-mails on my computer through Outlook. I have thousands & thousands of e-mails, dating back 10-15 years. I do try to weed through them occasionally, but at least they take up less space than paper. ; )
Sadly, I lost about two years’ worth of e-mails (not backed up, of course) awhile back when I was having trouble with my old desktop. I bought a new laptop & now do regular backups. However, I recently noticed that when the e-mails were transferred over from one computer to the other, something got lost in the coding & now they all have the same date & are stored with no apparent rhyme or reason. (Must remember to ask sister’s technogeek boyfriend about that.)
The ones I would miss most are the ones I sent to my pregnancy loss e-mail list, because they tell the story of my grief & my attempts at subsequent pregnancy. I no longer have the very first e-mail I sent, with Katie’s story (that got lost in the transfer from an earlier, more primitive computer, the very first one I owned), but I do have paper copies of it — all of them, actually, up to a point. I met Julia S. through that list (later reconnected through blogging) & I have almost every e-mail we ever exchanged too. : )
I recently went looking for an e-mail one of my cousins had sent me some years ago (turned out to be in 2000!!). I was afraid it too may have gotten lost in the shuffle, but there it was. It had a photo attached — one of only two photos I have ever seen of my great-grandmother, who passed away at the far too young age of 44, when my grandfather was 16. I was so tickled to find it again. I have saved the photo in my photo files, posted it to our private family group on FB & backed it up, just in case.
My gmail’s been working fine all day… Honestly, I just get updates on there and “deal of the day” stuff. It wouldn’t be a huge loss for me… now, losing other social networking stuff, like FB/Twitter/Blogger… I’d be lost!
Grey sends me emails daily, all of which I’ve kept. Those notes are precious to me and I would miss them dearly. Other than that, it would be the emails from major events that I would miss: letters of acceptance, messages about happy events from friends and family, emails with pictures, etc.
Bummer about Gmail. Any news as to why?
I didn’t know Gmail was down and we use it for work! Hmmm…wonder what I’ve been doing all day? 😉 I would be crushed if my text messages to and from my husband were lost. We communicate a lot that way and have fought, cried, celebrated, snarked and laughed via texts. As for email, I used Hotmail for my first “big girl” email account and I think it probably has some important conversations, especially while we were pursuing treatment, wedding planning, house buying, etc. I’m having problems getting into that account lately, and I know I need to fix that but I’m also liking the clean slate of my Gmail account (though I’ve been using it for years too).
Seems to be working now anyway. I pretty much care about any email for some reason but any ones from family and friends.
There are three categories of emails I’d miss the most – first, the ones between my then-future-husband and me when we were beginning our relationship, long-distance at the time; second, the multi-paragraph, life-story-summarizing ones between my best friend and me, which have often served as a reference to me as I look back on different stages of my life; and third, just the simple, sweet ones between me and my friends and family (of the genre, just thinking of you, love you, miss you).
If I had an email from Steve Jobs, I’d add a fourth category.
I have a dedicated email account with letters written for posterity to Burrito and Tamale from various friends and relatives; the ones from me are highly detailed accounts of everything about them at each age along with emotional outpourings that I don’t put anywhere else.
Everything else I could reconstruct or live without.