(20120117)

Welcome to "Your message was Deleted Without Being Read"!

This is a new adventure for me to try to learn a bit about blogging and to determine if I can make it of any use to myself. I have no real idea as to whether this will be interesting to anyone beyond me but for now, that will have to be good enough!

So, right off the bat, I suppose the first question is, "What's the deal with the odd title of the blog?" Well...I guess a bit of an explanation might be a good place to start. You see, I work in the Information Technology industry (That's Computers for those of you not familiar with the technical name of the job.) and as such, I send and receive a fair amount of email in any given day. Now, you might being saying to yourself, "OK, big deal, he sends and receives a bunch of email. Woo-hoo. Who doesn't?!" and, you'd be right except that, lately I've been getting a good many receipts from that sent email that indicate that the person I sent the email to not only did not read my email message but, Deleted the message without even reading it!!! Can you believe that? I know I struggle with it. After all, who wouldn't want to read something that I took the time and energy to compose especially for them? (Queue the "Irony" background music) ;)

Seriously though, I have always found it highly unusual when I receive such receipts in my email that indicate this message but then, it got me to really thinking. How often in our lives do we respond to people with the same underlying message? Email is a written form of communication that most people use on a daily basis in our work, school, and general interactions but, let's not forget that speech and human interaction is still the most important medium for getting through our daily lives. Remember that time when your folks were trying to talk to you about whatever it was that was so important to them at that moment but meant almost less than nothing to you? How did that conversation go? Mom: "When I was a kid we walked to and from school, up hill, in two feet of snow! We were just happy to even have feet! Blah, blah, blah....", You: "Yeah, Yeah. What-evs!! (Rolls eyes)" That response was functionally equivalent to the "Deleted without Being Read" message that I was mentioning earlier. You heard that your Mom was speaking but, you weren't really listening.

This phenomenon is not unique to children alone. We all interact with our family members, friends, and acquaintances on a daily basis and it would seem that there is sometimes a tendency to deliver the "Deleted Without Being Read" message even though that might not be our original intention. We're all busy in our own pursuits and daily drama, and it is easy to slip into that mode of not really hearing and appreciating what those who want to communicate with us want to get accross to us. The solution here is to remind yourself to stop and consider who is speaking to you, why they are speaking to you, and what the message is that they are trying to get accross.

Ok, so, maybe that wasn't such a brief explanation of the blogs title but, it was something that was on my mind, that I wanted to share with whoever cares to read this, and that I hope you did not "Delete Without Being Read".

Thanks for listening!