Losing three years' worth of e-mail

Any tool, used daily and intimately, begins to take on a disproportionate importance in your life. You know its strengths and weaknesses. You know its limits and its possibilities. And, subconsciously, you know how deeply you depend on its presence.

But the depth of your bond does not become completely clear until the tool is destroyed irrevocably.

E-mail is an odd beast. At first, it's just a thing that moves information. It's like a telephone, or a stack of stamps and envelopes. But over the course of months — and years — it begins to accumulate bits of your life. You trade jokes with old friends. You squirrel away contact information for a favorite author or someone you met on a trip to California. You put together a folder of nice things people have said to you, and turn to it for comfort on particularly rough days. You collect correspondence from a close friend whose e-mail has the poise and complexity of a novel by Virginia Woolf.

It stacks up, in layers and pockets, until you've got the computer-assisted history of your own electronic life.

Enter the "information technology" people.

They melt down the server. They re-install your e-mail program. And in a feat of technical skill that evokes a drunken Mr. Magoo performing major heart surgery, they drag all your collected e-mail into the trash. And then they empty the trash. And, as far as you can tell, they reformat the hard drive. Then they probably spit on it. And then spit on the spit.

Your personal life goes up in digital flames.

"Whoops. Oh well," they say.

Immediate physical symptoms: the sensation of being punched in the gut. A quick walk outside, where temperatures hover around 15 degrees. A swearing jag that would frighten a professional comedian.

New, daring, experimentally brilliant curses sting the icy January air. Trees are punched. Bits of ice are kicked across the concrete, punished for a crime they weren't remotely responsible for.

And then, reality sets in. It's all gone.

IT doesn't care — they "tried to fix it." Your e-mail program is still crashed. But even if it were restored to good health, it would still be completely disemboweled, its steaming guts strung out across the desolate place in your hard drive where information goes to die.

All that remains is a vague memory of memories, bound to surface intermittently over the coming months as you recall things you'd like to access, but can't.

But there is a positive aspect to all this. Think about the bright side, you tell yourself. You're a new man. You're starting over. You're sprinting hard into a bright future with no history to constrain your possibilities. You've suddenly gotten more American than you've been since high school — totally ignorant of the past, you dare to dream the impossible. You feel cleansed and liberated. You are Keyser Soze: hungry, pissed off, completely unencumbered and ready to burn down some houses.

Old friends who have faded away? Screw 'em. Distant hopes of employment? Bury that garbage. Acquaintances whom you hoped to get to know better? Pipe dreams.

So seize what you've got. Flush the rose-scented water of memory, shred the framed portraits, put the past in a shoebox, burn it and scatter the ashes on the Charles River.

It's a nice day to start again.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)