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Uroborus | Nov 22 2001

So I get this email from this guy, the husband of an old friend, which consists of a long attack of what a different old friend has written in a different group email addressed to me, among others, only he, the husband, more or less ignores everything said by my friend (who is also his wife’s ex-boyfriend, although that has nothing to do with anything) and instead responds, point by point, to various things he imagines him having said. This email is soon followed by a response from my friend, also sent as a group email, in which he attacks the husband for not only having ignored everything he’d written but also for having made shit up. Both emails are unnecessarily harsh, which upsets me but which happens a lot with email, people are unnecessarily harsh, and then I make the mistake of writing to the husband to tell him that the document he attached to his email crashed my computer and that he should try sending it another way, only what happens instead is that this begins an exchange of emails between us which is fraught with misunderstandings. I point this out to him, hoping to short-circuit the problem, only my pointing somehow leads to even greater misunderstandings between us, we have misunderstandings about our misunderstandings, and so at a certain point I give up: he writes me a long email that I don’t respond to and that’s it. Today, however, two weeks or something later, I feel sad about the whole thing—he is, after all, the husband of someone I care for, despite the fact that I almost never see her and certainly don’t keep in touch with her—and so I send the husband a brief email in which I attempt yet again to explain myself, knowing that this will only lead to more misunderstandings—which is where things stand at present, they stand at the point where I’ve sent the email and am awaiting word of exactly how everything I’ve said wasn’t at all what I said but something completely different and so on, and so on.