SCHUYLER – Cecilia Kelly, lovely woman. I think we might have had a date once. Or maybe we just exchanged letters.

JOE – You wrote her letters?

SCHUYLER – Mail. It was called mail.

NELSON – (fondly nostalgic and kidding it slightly) Stamps. Envelopes.

JOE – Wait. I’ve heard of it. It was a means of communication before I was born.

NELSON – Exactly.

Scene from “You’ve Got Mail” 1998, Warner Brothers

Something disastrous miraculous happened yesterday. The office email servers went down (or to be more accurate – they never showed up!) We had NO email servers from 7 pm the night before last through 11 pm last night. Interestingly enough, our company CEO chose that day to visit our office… Ironic, huh?

It got me to thinking (which as you no doubt know is always a dangerous thing)… what would my life or your life be like without email? Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that email was just an idea, a glimmer in someone’s eye. Yet today, virtually everyone who uses computers uses email as a natural part of doing business.

Don’t get me wrong; work still got done. All our other applications were functioning just fine, thank you very much. What was revealing was that inevitably, every task ended up bumping into the fact that at some point I needed feedback from someone not locally available. Brings up some interesting questions, don’t you think?

So here some things for you to ponder about just how connected we are these days:

1. How has your use of email changed the nature of what you do?
2. How has it changed who you are?

…Just Wondering…