#511 Nasty

When I was talking about bad emails the other day I had to pull up short and remember all the times I’d sent an email I shouldn’t have. Inevitably, I’d finally see an error in the text. When? Two nanoseconds after I had pressed the send button. Why is that? What is it about our capacity as human beings to screw up that we don’t realize we’re screwing up till after the screw-up has occurred? The foot-in-the-mouth caveat of Murphy’s Law.
We’ve all screwed up and sent something we shouldn’t have sent. That’s when we need something like Norton Unsend. A repository on your computer where passionate or angry emails are kept until you cool down. To give you a chance to read them like your potential receiver would. It wouldn’t have to be much. Maybe a three-minute delay while you develop a full case of buyer’s regret, or in this case, sender’s regret. And then it would pop back on your screen with a “Are you absolutely, positively sure you want to send this permanent record of your stupidity?”
Or maybe what we need is a new computer program. An addition to Word. We have spellcheck and grammarcheck. How about courtesycheck? Little squiggly lines would appear under inflammatory words or phrases you may eventually regret and want to change. The squiggly lines couldn’t be red or green since those are taken, so how about passionate purple? You’d have autocorrect options you could enable too. “Damn” would automatically change to “darn.” “You bitch” would change to “you dog’s mother” Extremely strong curse words would change to a series of random punctuation marks like they use in cartoons. The receiver would still know you were mad but the humorous marks would take the edge off. The program could be designed to detect subtle insulting qualities as well. You’d right click the purple line and a window would say, “Sharp sarcastic tone, please mellow.” Or, “Caution, passive aggressive voice (consider revising).”
America, ya gotta love it