If you've sent me an e-mail lately, be advised: The e-mail end of my Road Runner High Speed Internet Connection seems to have encountered some diabolical invention of the Acme Company that slows it to about the pace of a banana slug on valium. I'm just now receiving some messages sent to me last night and I got one that its sender swears was dispatched on Tuesday.
Hey, here's something about e-mail that sometimes bothers me. When I was in New York, I sent some e-mail via a rent-by-the-hour computer in the Business Center in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania. I didn't notice that the clock on the computer was set wrong and as a result, all those e-mails arrived at their destinations bearing time stamps a day or two before the correct date. They therefore didn't show up at the top of some folks' inboxes, and a couple of recipients didn't notice they had new mail from me. Why do e-mail readers work like that? Shouldn't the time stamp they display on a message be the time/date it was received? Or actually sent?
I get a lot of e-mails that are dated for the year 2000 because the sender didn't have the date set on their computer at all. I have a friend who keeps turning the clock back on her computer because she doesn't want a certain piece of "time trial" software to expire. As a result, every e-mail I get from her is dated before the one before. It's like she's pulling a Billy Pilgrim, coming unstuck in time.
Don't bother explaining this to me. It's not going to change and a good reason for it won't make my e-mail files any neater. I'm just venting.