"Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things"
-- Donald Knuth on his website.
Why Kamat has No Email
My father (the Kamat of Kamat's Potpourri) has no email access. The hundreds
of email messages we recieve every month to his contact address (kamats @ kamat.com)
are checked for relevancy (by me) and are resolved via snail-mail (print and post), telephone,
and letters. Kamat has no email for the same reason 99% of the world's population has no email access. Email is too expesive, too technical, and too fragile.
My father has never had a vehicle, has no television, no computer, and no refrigirator for the same reasons (?)
(He just has cameras, about twenty of them.) On the other hand, I am an email junkie. If I get up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom, I make it a point
to check my Inbox. I get anxious if I cannot check email for several hours. I get about fifty personal messages,
and ten work related messages; I reply to about half of them. I subscribe to two mailing lists, but those messages
directly go to the
trash bin. My email is scattered on six different computers, in various formats (AOL, Unix, Yahoo!, Outlook, Outlook Express),
and it is a royal pain for me just to keep up with the email.
Email is like as addiction to me, and I look forward to being sober from it. See Also: My other complaints about email
Note that I have decided to drop the hyphen from e-mail, at Professor Knuth's suggestion.
(Comments Disabled for Now. Sorry!) | First Written: Thursday, October 11, 2001 Last Modified: 1/29/2003 |
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