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My mailbox blew up!We now have another "excuse" to deal with when someone we're trying to reach is not responding. I had a customer service problem this week and the rep finally responded with "my mailbox blew up." Sure. As we become a more ecommerce-based society, we will come to rely less on 800 numbers for a service problem, and will be using email a lot more to get satisfaction. This week, I had a first-hand experience with what we have to look forward to. I tripped across a product on a Web site that looked terribly interesting. We'll call it a widget. I attempted to download the aforementioned widget, after coughing up $11 in virtual money to their ecommerce server. Once the file was on my hard drive, with a suffix of ".zip", I attempted to open it. Unfortunately it failed to respond to my ministrations. I downloaded it two more times, and it just wouldn't display its contents. The error message, and the WinZip help page said that file corruption was the most likely explanation. This was somewhat frustrating, but being the relaxed kind of guy that I am, I sent an email to the company, explaining the problem and what I had done. I wanted to forestall their giving me lame suggestions like, "download it again" or "are you sure you have the right software." Hey, I'm an expert here and I don't want some mope trying to put me off with the usual stalling tactics. Anyway, there wasn't any response. I didn't expect one for a couple of days, but after 72 hours, I was a little ticked. So I emailed them again. This time, I made it clear that I was going to be refusing the charge when the credit card payment came. We can say that the tone of my message was...stern. Gosh, all of a sudden, an email from the company arrives in my in-box this morning. The writer said that her "email box blew up." Hmmmm. Could it possibly be that she had ignored me until I sent a follow up message threatening them with some retribution? Naw...their "email blew up." I shouldn't be so cynical. In the last year, I think I can come up with at least 5 instances where someone didn't respond to my email very quickly, if at all. And in all cases, they used some variant on their email system not functioning properly. It is important to remember, as I've said elsewhere, that email is a remarkably unreliable way of sending data and asking questions. Unless you're following up on the messages you send, you will not get much satisfaction. Email systems fail constantly. Viruses corrupt. Servers get full. Systems crash. It happens all the time. But the most likely thing to happen is that your correspondent just didn't bother to respond to your message. See if you can notice the common thread in these phrases: "my voice mail is acting
up"
Sure, email can blow up. It explodes all the time. But it's just as likely that they didn't check their messages, didn't feel like responding, or in the case of the company I was dealing with, they probably hoped I would go away. But remember, I NEVER go away. Email, if you organize it properly, lets you easily keep track of the messages you've sent, and the ones that are awaiting responses. And that, dear readers, is the subject of a future column.
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