The FBI found 650,000 emails on a laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, an aide to Hillary Clinton, right?
Their reaction to this trove was “Gee, some of them might have been to or from Hillary herself so we’d better look into this.”
My reaction was, “Six hundred and fifty thousand emails? Holy cow, when did these people sleep?”
The answer is probably never. Or at least not much.
I did a little math.
Say they spent an average of one minute per email, which is certainly reasonable since many emails take a lot longer than that.
Six hundred and fifty thousand divided by the number of minutes in an hour is 10,833 hours.
That’s a lot of hours – 451 days worth of hours, in fact.
The stories didn’t say how long the Weiners owned and used the laptop, but let’s say it was three years, which is reasonable length of time given the general crappy quality of laptops these days.
That means they spent a full third of their time over the course of those three years composing, reading or sending emails, and that’s not even including time for sleeping, eating or Mr. Weiner’s hobby of sending creepy selfies of his “little friend” to females.
Even if they owned it for five years, that’s a boatload of emails and a huge chunk of their lives they’ll never get back.
There’s gotta be a lesson for the rest of us in there somewhere. If so, maybe it’s this: We waste too much precious time reading and writing emails.
Life happened before emails, you know. And before texts, tweets, Facebook or emoticons, too. Factories ran, newspapers published, children were born, people died — all of life, in fact, proceeded pretty much as it does today, all without benefit of instant communication.
I like to think I wouldn’t miss email or texting if they’d never been invented. Millennials, however, would probably be lost if tech devises suddenly disappeared or stopped working.
Millennial: “How am I going to contact my clients?”
Me: “Send them a letter.”
Millennial: “What’s that?”
Me: “It’s where you write with a pen or a pencil on a piece of paper. Then you seal it in an envelope and put it in your mailbox and wait three days for it to be delivered and another three days, if you’re lucky, to get a response.”
Millennial: “Too slow. I’ll text them instead.”
Me: “The cellphones are all dead too. You’ll have to go talk to them.”
Millennial: “You mean like face to face?”
Me: “Yes, face to face. Is that a problem?”
Millennial: “It’s just … thwump!”
That’ll be the sound of them fainting and hitting the floor after realizing they might have to actually talk to another human being to get something done.
Don’t worry. A month of binge watching and they’ll be just fine.
Image credit: Sebastien Wiertz
The art of communication has been lost. What fun it was to get a letter. Email just doesn’t have the same warm, fuzzy feel. Personally, I don’t want to be that connected, so I don’t even have a smart phone. I can’t text and rarely turn on the cellphone I do have. Give me the written word. I can read it, reread it and fully understand it. Email is too impersonal. Fine for business. Not for personal.
The lovely yet formidable Marcia sends the occasional letter to our son and daughter at college. They love it. Sam, who is 22, actually wrote back a hand-written note!
When family and friends live across the country and half way ’round the globe in so many different time zones, texting and email are a godsend. And FaceTime! The wonder of seeing grandkids flourish when you are only able to hug them in person every couple of years.
I do like Facetime. And Facebook.
I agree with Pat. But when your friends and relatives all live fairly close, what’s wrong with sending personal invitations or birthday cards the old way? If my wife didn’t have a Facebook page I would miss everything. What I find really in bad taste is when you find out a relative has passed away through Facebook. Guess I am just old fashioned.
I think of what future biographies will look like. Of course they’ll be digital
Lots of LOL, 4get, memes, 144 characters, emojis……
My daughter has been doing a FB site family tree. Some wonderful letters have been posted bringing to life settlement in America, a look at post war Europe.
We’re hoping for more.
Huma’s one explanation of it (early on) was that she had taken some of State Dept work home so she could copy it better – or some such excuse.
You are wrongly assuming that these e-mails were all generated by Huma & Anthony.
The whole sorry mess just further shows what a loose department Hillary was running.
Spot on, Andrew! 650,000 emails is crazy, and by the time they sort through them (IF they sort through them) the election will be over. But the fact remains, it’s an absurd figure and makes me wonder if the whole thing wasn’t trumped up. (Sorry….)
I would hate to give up email, but would happily turn in my cell phone (flip, still, smart enough for me) and if I never had to text again? Fine.
I just think that’s how these people live. Their job (and, um, hobby) are their lives.
One good thing about email and texts and such: Many more Americans write now, compared with the pre-email days. Even in the 1970s, Americans generally considered writing to be a specialized skill, too fancy for regular folks, especially for regular American guys. That has changed.
I kept in touch regularly with my family via snail mail while I was stationed in Germany and many of them were in California. (early ’80s). By the mid/late ’90s we were all online and used e-mail but the novelty wore off. I rarely even look at my e-mail, if my wife didn’t use Facebook I’d hardly ever hear about what few family members I have left are doing.