Meaningless Rant: E-mail Accounts

Just a short rant regarding a recent annoyance in my life.

Anyone who is reading this likely has an e-mail account.  It provides quick, easy communication.  I’m not sure how I would survive without e-mail these days.  Most organizations, be it a company, a school, or what have you, have come to a similar conclusion.

So my university has decided that school e-mail accounts are mandatory.  They have told instructors to ignore any e-mails recieved from private student accounts and only respond when a student e-mails from his or her Fordham address.

And then the school where I teach, which does not even recycle paper, has decided to “go green”.  No more handout notices to teachers – we get e-mail notices.  (Nevermind that the computer they put in my classroom is so old that it takes no less than ten minutes just to get in and view the first e-mail.)  But we cannot provide our private e-mail accounts – no, we’re assigned e-mail accounts from the Board of Education.

So every day, I’m supposed to check, in addition to my e-mail, my work e-mail and my university e-mail.  The latter two I have yet to figure out how to even change the password.  As a result, half the days that I actually remember to check these accounts, I lock myself out in the vain attempt to decode the password (one of which is a combination of parts of some zip code that I’ve lived at in the past ten years, I can never remember which, combined with parts of my social security number, and the other is a random assorment of letters, numbers, and symbols that make Chinese characters look simple.)

I don’t understand why I need designated accounts when I don’t even have a desk job.  Or why can’t they at least make their forwarding options obvious so I can just forward it all to my g-mail account?  (Or at least make the option for changing your password more obvious!)

So here I sit, multiple tabs open, my .COM and .GOV and .EDU accounts all open as I contemplate the meaning of my existence…each account seems to be reminding me of an aspect of life that I feel I am desperately behind in.  I’m longing to relax and socialize, then feeling guilty every time I go out with friends or pick up a book that has nothing to do with any class I’ve ever taken. 

And with all this on my mind, I venture out into the world. 

And people see me and they say: “Smile, Anna.”