Stories, Articles, Advises, and more...

But why wouldn't you be interested? I could send you mail.

His intensely blue eyes, magnified behind bottle-bottom thick glasses, changed from excitement to puzzlement. I hate blue eyes, but even so I would never have hurt him inten- tionally.

"But why wouldn't you be interested? I could hook you up myself, no problem." Then, the real bait: "I could send you mail." He was enthusiastic and insistent, a new convert still reeling with the force of his revelation. His subject was e-mail.

And he was trying to convert me too. I suppose I should be more charitable now that I think about his offer--to wire my desktop into the campus network he would surely have had to crawl on the floor under my desk armed with a screwdriver. But even now I can't think of anything more pointless. Here was a man who had an office just a few steps away from mine, yet he wanted to connect me up to the Internet just so he could send me electronic mail. Why?

He could, of course, simply drift down the hall as he usually did, aggravating other colleagues in other offices along his route, checking his mail (paper, not electronic), stopping to get a cup of coffee along the way. He could plop down in my ratty hand-me-down chair, make fun of the junk on my desk, ridicule the book I was teaching or the memo I was writing, get an answer to his question or a reaction to his proposal, and then leave when he was ready or when I threw him out. Or, just as simply, he could call me on the telephone.

He looked at me in disbelief, but he was persistent, and the blue eyes lit up when he thought of one further enticement. I could not only receive mail from him, of course, I could receive mail from dozens--probably hundreds!--of other academics all across the country. He'd just checked his "mailbox" and had found messages from ninety-seven historians waiting for him! I could become one of the 12 to 50 million Americans (estimates disagree), overwhelmingly people (estimates agree), who communicate electronically. In an act of self- lessness, he was willing to share this brave new world with me.

He was as stunned at my rejection as I was at his offer. He was thrilled by his new-found potential for connection. I was horrified at the prospect.