Angelo DiTocco
There once was a time when communication was simple. In order to communicate with those from distant lands, you had to either spin a little wheel around on your rotary phone, send them letters by mail, or visit them in person. But that all changed when James Email invented the email in 2013. Now people can send ridiculous requests or advertisements to you at any hour of the day, and in today’s attention economy, they are quite persistent in doing so.
A wise man by the name of Arthur O’Sullivan recently said, “it’s a lot easier to write agitated than comfortable,” and he was 100% right. As such, I will now proceed to categorize all the absurd and pointless messages that I receive via my school email account every single day, and hopefully, after reading it, you too will have a strong desire to live in the woods like Uncle Ted.
Clubs I Don’t Care About
I’ve been in this situation more times than I can count: I’m at UFest or one of its many spin-offs, when an e-board member of some random club I’ve never heard of is suddenly all up in my face begging me to join it. Perhaps this e-board member is my friend’s friend’s friend whom I’m trying to be nice to, or maybe she’s a perfect 10 who channels my inner SIMP. Whatever the case may be, I write my name and email address on the sign-up sheet for the Mixed-Race Interpretive Gooning Society, knowing full well I’m just gonna leave halfway through the GIM.
Although these clubs are no longer a part of my life, their ghosts still haunt me forever in the form of their newsletters. Their weekly-or-so notifications serve as a constant reminder of my lack of commitment, but at the same time, they’re just infrequent enough that I don’t bother unsubscribing from them.
Ads That Don’t Apply to Me
I don’t know a lot about economics, but I do know about the saying, “the customer is always right in matters of taste.” So as a “customer” of the Watson School of Engineering, I ask the higher-ups: what makes you think I’ll change my mind the fourth time (I counted) you advertise the new summer class with gen-ed attributes I already have? No matter how interesting you make Intersectional TikTok Studies out to be, I’m not paying an extra $2000 just to do a bunch of worksheets and essays without ever seeing the professor in the flesh.
It doesn’t stop at classes either. I’ve also gotten these advertisements for various “Women in STEM™” clubs as well as a literal sorority. As much as I respect female scientists and engineers, I am simply not one of them. Maybe those people who put pronouns in their email signatures are up to something—I need to let these advertisers know that just because I go sitting down doesn’t mean I’m a woman.
Jobs and Internships I Won’t Get
Imagine you’re looking for a date. You could take the traditional, tried-and-true (though not by me) route of approaching people in real life and making connections, or you could swipe endlessly on one of the many degenerate dating apps with no success. Looking for jobs is not that much different, with the job market’s “dating apps” being platforms like Indeed, LinkedIn, and Handshake. These platforms continue to send me emails in the hopes that I’ll waste my valuable time chasing after the businesses they decide to shill for. By looking at the job postings themselves, I can see that these companies are out of my league anyway. For example, they might be looking for experience in every single programming language except the ones I learned in school. Even if I could get the job, it would be a painful long-distance commute from my home in the middle of nowhere, so I’ll probably just go my own way and work at the concession stand again.
That’s not to mention all the catfish who tempt you with promises of extremely easy remote jobs that pay $400 for 3 hours. You’d think that with BU’s Draconian requirement for everyone to have two-factor authentication, these scams wouldn’t be a thing, but nope, I guess even that’s not secure enough.
Classmates Bothering Me
Now, I might be a lifelong STEM enthusiast, but there is one art form I practice often—the art of procrastination. Unfortunately, this art form has become a lot harder in recent years with online communication becoming the norm. What used to be my time to relax and watch some fatal car crash compilations now gets constantly interrupted by messages like, “hey why haven’t you started your slide yet we’re supposed to present tomorrow,” to which I have to painstakingly reply, “fuck off i told you i was gonna get it done while the other group is presenting.” Even when the upcoming due date is not for a group project, I still get loads of simpletons in my inbox asking for “help” (answers). One guy just straight-up said “let’s cheat on the online test together” and sent me a Discord link.
Conclusion
There tends to be a long-standing joke about meetings that could have been an email, but they often forget how annoying emails themselves can be. Whether it be a fellow student pestering me at odd hours of the night, an advertisement for something I’ll never care about, or something I once subscribed to long ago, it seems that every new message I receive in my inbox has only a 1% chance of being useful. As cool as modern technology can be, this barrage of spam only leaves me wanting to return to the good old days of 2011 when the carrier pigeon was still around.