E-Mail Etiquette

Here are a couple of things I’ve been wondering about lately.

Is there an appropriate number of responses to an e-mail? When you e-mail someone and begin a discussion, he or she will write back, you answer with a question, they respond, you ask something else, in what you suppose to be a conversational fashion, only they never reply to it. You have either to start a new conversation or give up on the correspondence completely. Is there some rule that says you only have to answer twice? I suppose the marathon conversations I have with Carter, spanning months and hundreds of replies to the sane same threads have broken that rule.

What about the “contact me” buttons on people’s blogs? What is the purpose of them if no one ever reads the e-mail? Well, if they do, they don’t respond, so what’s the point? On the rare occasion someone has e-mailed me about my blog, I was so excited to find out there was someone out there somewhere who actually reads this drivel that I responded asap. Perhaps if I ever get to be one of the popular blogs I will get so much fan mail that I cannot respond. I always try to do my e-mail the way I learned to do letter writing, you leave some things open-ended so the recipient will have something to write back about and you begin what’s called a correspondence. This can go on for years.

I still write an occasional letter, but e-mail is so much more convenient. I really don’t write anyone the way I should, however. The only one lately is one of my best friends, who is in Iraq, otherwise I don’t write much, even though I know I should, but if you received a letter in the mail, would you only answer twice and then quit? No, I have not even for a moment thought about the possibility that I was boring. What? Nope, never thunk it.

In other thoughts, I am really aggravated about not being able to ride in my car with my hat. I don’t know what to do. I feel naked without it, plus I actually have to comb my hair more than once a day. Whatever happened to the era of hats, anyway? Not ball caps, which are worn in uncouth and inappropriate manners with inappropriate manners. I mean, I remember my dad getting dressed up and putting on a nice felt fedora. Men use to wear suits and ties to church with a nice hat on top of their head that they took off when entering.

Who ever said that you don’t have to remove headgear anymore when you enter a building anyway? Miss Manners http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/columns/missmanners/ (my heroine, even though I would be petrified to meet her, I love her writing.) says that all hats, including cowboy hats, should be removed when entering a building. The only exception she makes is for an actual working cowboy, who never removes his hat for any reason. I have modified this rule myself, as it is easier to leave my hat on in the grocery store and places like that. Women never remove their hats.

Remember, the good book says, “Tip your hat to this lady, son…”