While I was out on Tuesday getting my hair coiffed and back to school shopping with my daughter, my website went down. I returned to find only two lonely emails in my in box and I knew something was amiss. When folks are surprised at how quickly I email them back, I explain that the volume of email in my inbox on a daily basis is such that if I don't email them back immediately chances are their email will be lost forever. Yes, it's that bad people.

I was scratching my head thinking that maybe it was just a slow email day or something was wrong with Yahoo. Then my mother called us to explain that she had emailed me twice and gotten a bounce back with a permanent error code.

Oh...that's not good.

Thank God for moms! If we didn't worry so much, nothing would ever get done. It took me a half an hour of poking around to find an actual phone number to call Yahoo. Is it just me or does everyone make it impossible to contact them these days?! Sheesh. While on the phone with a very patient customer service representative who was actually in America and not India (kudos to Yahoo for not sending their customer service overseas), we deduced the problem was with our website. We had it fixed and my website and email were back online by 8pm.

So really we're talking eight hours of no email. No biggie, right?

Wrong.

Yesterday I had no less than five people tell me they had attempted to email me on Tuesday. Who else emailed? Oprah? Martha? Publisher's Clearing House? The Travel Channel? One quarter of one day of email issues and I think I may have missed out on every golden opportunity I've worked towards for the past five years.

Damn.

I figured I'd post one last time about this situation in the slim hopes that anyone who emailed me Tuesday might Google me and end up here and give it another shot. What more can I do?

Email, the world's most highly imperfect form of communication has taken over my professional life. It is holding the key to my success or failure. One of my very important contacts in a new venture has a recently implemented spam filter that has decided my email is spam. This has me in a dither, what to do?! I tried emailing from my personal account, but who knows if it reached them. I mean let's face it, our emails may not reach their destination a good ten percent of the time and we have no clue. It's almost like sending out a message in a bottle. Then we sit around chewing our fingernails wondering why they've not responded or if they did and it got lost in the ethers or if maybe they don't like us and think us smelly.

I read recently that we spend so much time emailing people it's become the great modern time sucker. Probably closely followed by the text message, which is as far as I'm concerned like having a ball and chain around one's leg. People are obsessive about this texting, they're texting while driving, they're texting while conversing with other people...which is so far beyond rude it needs another category. It takes me ten minutes to text ‘OK' and quite frankly I'd like to keep it that way. We are far too connected and yet more disconnected than we've ever been. We have more pathways of communication, yet we have more communication epic fails than ever before. It's a conundrum to be sure.

We are going to the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee next week. This means no internet or computer for six glorious days. You can email me all you want but I won't email you back. Try not to take it personally, I won't email anyone else back either. I won't be able to approve comments or respond to them. I won't blog, Twitter, write on your Facebook wall, read your MySpace bulletins or participate in any form of viral marketing. I'll be sitting on a porch on a rocking chair sippin' some moonshine and pickin' a banjo. Then I'll be going to Dollywood and a few huge flea markets in search of some kick arse ephemera and vintage jewelry. We have an 8 bedroom three story cabin, but unfortunately none of our friends or family were able to come along. So it's just the three of us and our dog Mrs. Fellerbee. Our Amish neighbors will be caring for the pigs, chickens, tomatoes (which have cruelly waited to ripen until the week we're away) and watching our house to make sure all is well. Tomorrow I'll blog my weekly links and then it'll be no Madge until the 25th of August when I'll post more links and maybe a photo or two from our adventures and I will be another year older and hopefully wiser.

PLEASE DON'T FORGET! The deadline for 1MB or smaller jpegs of your Kewpie Doll Contest projects is due to my inbox by September 5th! margot@margotpotter.com

xoxo
Madge