Did you get my email?

March 9, 2008

Write before break a student asked me “Did you get my email?” I suddenly just wanted to laugh. I receive more than 50 emails a day, and that does NOT include any of my listservs. So perhaps instead of asking such an absurdly vague question, he could’ve said anything else. I was doubled over with the whole situation, so I turned to my student teacher and asked him if he had a response. See, we’d recently made several copies of a famous poem response to: “What’d I miss yesterday?” So Joe wrote a response, which I read to the student and class an hour later. It went something like this:

The most popular question

posed to teachers post Year 2000
Did you get my email?
Why, Yes! I just happen to be
perfectly in tune with my email
and knew the instant you emailed me
at 4:45 A.M. and I gladly roused myself
out of the some insignificant dream
to answer your desperate questions
about the project assigned 2 months ago
due in the morning.
No. Nope, no, no I didn’t
Apparently the tubes that make up
the internet were clogged due to some
information traffic jam
and your vital email hopeless floated
around the net only, arriving apparently
much to late to be any use to you now.

Why Yes! And I even took the time
to reply to you anxiously with
full in-depth analysis,
a researched 3-pronged thesis
and I included for your viewing pleasure
a Work Cited in MLA, APA, and Chicago formats,
complete with proper spelling and punctuation.

No. Nope, no, no I didn’t
I decided that I was going to change up
my email address and not tell anyone
so I could avoid having to answer all
and any questions you may have
which could have been simply solved
by Googling the information
to save me the time or even better
by checking the syllabus you requested
and I forwarded to you multiple times
again and again.