COLD-WAR TOMBSTONES

Do you know the kind of email you write, where your fingers are shaking with anger?

My Dad once told me I should always write these, but never send them. He said it would be good to just leave that kind of thing there in the drafts folder, come back to it the next day, and then decide whether to send it or not.

As a result, my drafts folder is bulging with angry essays. Some are funny, and some are just irrelevant. Some are absolutely nuclear. If my email client ever got confused and accidentally sent them all from the server, I'd be in a lot of trouble.

Anyway, I added another to it today.

Trembling fury punched its way across my keyboard as I gritted my teeth and narrowed my eyes, my heart pounding with frustration.

"This is the most important thing I've ever written," said my head, shaking.

It wasn't. Of course it wasn't, but in the heat of the moment, that thing, that passion, that issue, is all consuming, isn't it? The red-mist seems to block out a lot of the detail and context that a level head would spot a mile away.

There should be a name for these kind of furious emails. I can't think of a good one. Rantymails? Vent Messages? Fury-drafts?

Well, whatever, these angrymails, these time-capsules of digital road rage are swelling inside my unsent folders, rattling with explosive phrases like...

"I thought we had agreed..."

and

"If you're going to..."

and

"This is totally unacceptable."

Totally. Ha. Really, Matt, really? I mean 'acceptability' (if that's even an objective quantity) doesn't have shades, does it? Either something's acceptable or it's not, you angry old goat.

It did occur to me today that I have collected a lot more of these outbound Draft-Ragers than I've ever received. And if I have received them, I get the feeling that I've expunged them from both my inbox and my memory, in equal measure.

It would be no surprise then to know that there are few out there that could have been intended for me but never made it this far.

Who knows? Perhaps on servers all over the world, there are billions of unsent declarations of disapproval, sitting there like cold-war tombstones from a forgotten era - dead and never sent. Imagine the damage they could have done.

My Dad was right. He is a wise man indeed.