By Barely Legal
Special to the Legal
I was at happy hour with some work friends last Friday, and after a couple of drinks, when we ran out of things to talk about, we pulled out our BlackBerrys and iPhones and started checking our e-mail and Facebook and Twitter accounts.
We all had an e-mail from a colleague that I can't help but find handsome, smart and funny. One of the girls I was with rolled her eyes at his e-mail and I, a little loose from the wine, immediately jumped to his defense. We went back and forth for a bit, until she eventually accused me of having a crush on him. Of course, I denied it.
Skipping all the boring details, next I'm in a cab. Just me and my BlackBerry and an e-mail from my work crush (about work, sent to multiple contacts). I contemplated all the cute, funny, flirty things I could respond back, but eventually made the decision to just put my mobile away.
The next morning I woke up, and in that early still-half-asleep haze I freaked out that I had actually sent him an e-mail. As I scrambled out of bed, located my work bag, and dumped all of its contents onto the floor, I actually started to wake up. I remembered that my phone wasn't in my bag, but plugged in to the charger, and that I never sent that e-mail.
I grabbed my phone anyway and discovered a quarantined message: a possible spam message about replica luxury watches.
That is when it hit me. If my e-mail can automatically prevent messages from being delivered, why can't they prevent them from being sent?
Obviously, not all of them -- that would defeat the purpose of e-mail. But maybe you could set up settings -- similar to the way you set up an out-of-office reply -- preventing any e-mail being sent, say, after 9 p.m. with more than two spelling errors in it, or something. Those messages would be held over until the next day when you can confirm that you really mean to send it.
I mean, what if I had sent exactly what I was thinking in the back of that cab -- spelling errors and all?
What if I had accidentally "replied to all"? (Because that never happens.) Instead of reading through a bunch of "all attorney" messages that have nothing to do with me that next morning, I would have been reading through responses to my carelessness, including at least one from my happy hour cohort celebrating the fact that she was right about my crush all along. Not to mention my boss asking me what the hell I was thinking. One from HR, I'm sure, and possibly several from the girlfriend of my crush, who I assume is the jealous sort that often sneaks out of bed at night to snoop through his BlackBerry.
But if my smartphone were equipped with this new technology, I wouldn't always have to rely on my own good sense. Which, let's be honest, has failed me in the past. I would see the e-mail sitting in my "confirm" bin, laugh, delete it and then make myself coffee, toasting my close call.
Sadly, I am not smart enough to develop the technology. But if one of my readers could write the program and then let me know where it is available for downloading -- it could save me a lot of future embarrassment.
Barely Legal offers humorous monthly musings on what it's really like to work for a law firm. Hint: It's nothing like it is on TV.
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