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Some e-mail funnies:
I used to work for a multimillion dollar consulting firm doing desktop support. The gentleman who was in charge of several large government contracts decided he needed to send a letter via email and wanted to know how to do so. Easy enough I suppose, until he happily handed me his letter on a sheet of paper crumpled up into a ball. "That is the letter I want to send," he said. "Can't you stuff it into the floppy drive and send it?" I tried to contain my laughter and explained to him how email worked. Of course, after I left I went outside and cried tears of uncontrollable laughter.
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My boss never could get the hang of email. He only used email for one thing: sending weekly messages to his daughter, an English instructor in Saipan. We will call her Mary Smith, but that was not her name. Her address was simple enough, but every week he would call me over to the computer with another problem.
Boss: "It's gone! The email I just spent an hour typing is gone!"
Me: "What happened?"
Boss: "I clicked 'Send,' and it just disappeared!"
Me: "It's in your outbox, because you told the computer to 'Send' it."
Boss: "Oh."
This happened almost every week. Either that or:
Boss: "It won't let me send this message."
Me: "You need to type her exact email address, not just 'Mary Smith' in the To: field."
Boss: "Well, how many Mary Smiths could there be in Saipan?"
Or:
Boss: "I send email every week, they ought to know who it goes to by now!"
Or:
Boss: "I thought computers were supposed to be smart!"
He would always send his emails on Tuesday so they would get to his daughter by Saturday.
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I teach a class at a university in which the students have to email their assignments. Despite the fact that the email address is printed about three times in the course handbook, and I repeated it 20 or so times and wrote it on the board, one student wanted to know why her emailed assigment kept being returned with error messages. The reason? Instead of the proper email address, in the "To" field she had: "any teacher for LL101".
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I was teaching a friend of mine how to use email for the first time. After going through scrutinizing 30 minutes of basic concepts of email in comparison to the real post office mail and answering her novice questions, we decided it was time for her to get her feet wet.
I had already signed her up for a free web-based email account. She logged in with her username and password, took her time to compose a message, and sent it successfully to her sister with such pride in her eyes.
Me: "Good job! That wasn't so hard, was it?"
Her: "No...."
Me: (smiles)
Her: (stares at the monitor)
Me: "What are you doing?"
Her: "Just a sec." (stares some more)
Me: "Are you...looking for something on the screen?"
Her: "Yeah, I am waiting for a reply!"
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Friend: "Did you get the email I sent about my sound card?"
Me: "Nope, haven't seen it yet. When did you send it?"
Friend: "Sent it this morning, you should have it by now."
Me: "Let me check again. Hmmm. Nothing."
Friend: "Oh, duh! It's President's Day. It probably won't get delivered today."
Me: (stifling laughter) "Oh yeah, that must be it. Just to be sure I get it, send it again to my other address."
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