Engage Brain Before Pressing the "Send" Button

Here's something that should be next to every computer:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PRIVATE E-MAIL. BEFORE YOU CLICK THE "SEND" BUTTON, ASK YOURSELF HOW YOU WOULD FEEL IF THAT E-MAIL APPEARED ON A BILLBOARD NEXT TO THE INTERSTATE WITH YOUR NAME AND E-MAIL ADDRESS.

Seriously, people. If you send out a stupid e-mail, it could go viral. And then there you are, with your skivvies hanging down all over the Internet.

In this case the sender was a third-year law student at Harvard. She sent out an e-mail to proclaim that she wasn't a racist and then made comments that would not have been out of place at an upscale cross-burning. Maybe it took her an hour's worth of typing to hammer out an obnoxiously racist and stupid e-mail.

She will never be able to run far enough away from that. It may take her decades until that e-mail is buried under a torrent of other data associated with her name. (It's not e-mail, but think of how long it'll take Miss Teen South Carolina to get away from her little YouTube moment.)

I know from past experience. In the 1980s I wrote a short story. It was a little bit "blue" and "off-color". You might have found something like it in certain magazines that were not sold to children. (Are you getting the flick?) I posted it to an adults-only section of a proprietary computer network, under my own name. This was, mind you, years before the development of the World Wide Web, let alone the explosion in Web usage. There were several levels of access one had to go through to get to that story, back then. That story migrated from that computer network to the Internet. I can't prove it, but I am fairly certain that the existence of that story has hurt me.

There is no excuse for that sort of stupidity, not any more.

Second story: In early 1998, within a week of each other, both Sonny Bono and a member of the Kennedy family died when they skied into trees. There was an e-mail circulating soon afterwards that went something like this:

Dear Humans- We will kill a celebrity every week until you stop all logging. Sincerely, the Trees.

I forwarded it. It got forwarded by others. And, like in many of those forwarding chains, somebody along the way truncated the chain of senders. The e-mail eventually wound up being sent to a neurosurgeon who took great exception to it and wrote me a scathing e-mail, assuming that I had originated it. (I wrote back a 3 point e-mail, (1) It was not original to me (2) I have no idea who the frell you are and (3) lighten. the. fuck up.)

Point is: If you are not willing to stand on a soapbox and read your e-mail aloud to random passers-by and if you are not willing to have to defend what you wrote to everyone you know, don't send the fucking e-mail.