Ding. What’s that? An email. From whom? A professor asking you to sign up for mandatory office hours? Or maybe it’s from a prospective boss asking you to sign up for an interview in the next few days marked **URGENT ACTION REQUIRED ASAP**… and then, ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. 10 more emails. All from Change.org. You’re lost in my inbox.
You literally aren’t even deserving of being sent to spam. SPAM. You literally aren’t even worth evoking the image of a slimy chunk of mystery meat, saltier than the tears of the repressed housewives that force fed it to their kids in the 1950s. Instead, you have become one of the many. And by “many”, I mean the 12,000 other unread emails clogging up my inbox like a toilet after a late-night Jo’s run. Now, you’re buried under every Facebook notification I’ve ever gotten, every sale Sephora has ever had, and every single thought that has ever gone through Beto O’Rourke’s publicist’s head.
Every time I say the words “I should really clean out my inbox”, it’s a cute little moment of dramatic irony because the universe knows something I don’t, which is that I’m never actually going to clean out my inbox. Seriously, if I had a nickel for every time I promised to clean out my inbox, I would have like a dollar, which isn’t a lot of nickels but it’s a lot of times to promise to clean out an inbox and then not do it.
The other day, I got an email demanding that I pay the sender exactly .0689901 bitcoin. In exchange, they vowed not to share compromising footage of me “watching exciting videos while enduring an enormous amount of pleasure” with all my friends and family.
Of course, this email shocked me, but what was even more shocking was that, even after being aggressively blackmailed, I still couldn’t bring myself to delete an email. Why? Because a small, sadistic part of me enjoys the thrill of a cluttered inbox. Especially when the thrill is finding an email a month late, the one marked **URGENT, RESPOND IMMEDIATELY WITHIN 24 HOURS**, and then having to write a lame, half-assed response that goes a little like this:
“Dear Professor so and so,
I’m so sorry for the late response. Somehow, (oh my god I have no idea how I’m so silly hahaha) this email got LOST IN MY INBOX. At least my dog didn’t eat my homework though LOL. Is there any way I could still be considered for the position that I applied to 3 months ago with no follow up and lied on my resume about that part where I said I knew photoshop anyway?
Hope to hear from you,
Laurel”
But the real consolation prize of being a lost-in-my-inbox slut is finding that 25 dollar target e-gift card that my aunt sent me for Hanukkah 5 years ago. Don’t wait too long to check your inbox though, you know, because of inflation.
P.S. Dear people at Brown Outdoor Leadership Training, I’m sorry I never signed up for an interview slot to be a BOLT leader. You already know what happened.