My name is Dabbsy and I am an emailoholic
I can give this up any time I want, honest
I have 30 email addresses. Maybe more, I’m not certain.
I have them on every computer and even carry some around on my smartphone. At the height of my addiction, I was creating domains and distributing email addresses to my wife and my employees. I even gave some to my children when they were still children.
My children-who-are-no-longer-children don’t use email at all. They use social media.
This makes them very difficult to contact because any message I send them arrives unnoticed among billions of others. So my invitation for them to visit at Christmas usually ends up bobbling around amid a boiling froth of Web X.0 inbox chaos alongside rape threats, calls for jihad and electronic cat-toy ads.
No wonder young people are so miserable: they insist on having all this grotesque shit messaged to them directly rather than benefit from the non-real-time benefit of email wandering in after a short delay having already been disinfected via a spam filter.
Me, I have email addresses, lots of them. To feel modern, I set them up to send me notifications. These go to my notebook, to my phone, to my wristwatch. All the bloody time, buzz buzz ding-a-ding.
How did I let it come to this? This is my story.
Like everyone else, I started with just the one. I knew I could deal with the message load. Well, actually it was two email addresses: I was already getting a supply via an account at my workplace and this led me to start growing them in a spare bedroom at home by the light of a hydroponic angle lamp.
Two email addresses should have been enough for me; none of us should have more than two. We all have a clenched-buttock work email address along the lines of dabbsa@amalgamated-durables.com, for example, and inevitably a slightly embarrassing home email address such as honkytonkman7359@yeehar.co.uk.
So where did my other 28 come from?
Back in the 1990s, my home stash came courtesy of an American company called CompuServe. Anybody remember CompuServe? [A solitary “whoop” at the back, followed by a cough and an apology] Your email address was a series of nine numbers with a full-stop before the last four. Elon Musk’s kids would have loved this aspect of personalisation.
Even so, while CompuServe was creaky and less than reliable, I wasn’t actually stupid enough to join the total fuck-ups known as AOL. But then a pusher who went by the unlikely street name of "Jobsy" invited me to join something called eWorld.
It’s always the way: they start you on the soft highs and you think you can handle it but you can’t.
It wasn’t long before I grew resistant to the hallucinatory experience of eWorld and began craving the hard stuff. So I revived my old CIX account…
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