Chapter 2: Chain Letter by Stephen Simpson
Marlene sits down at her desk and tapping the escape button
on her keyboard she brings her computer to life.
With the soft humming of the computer surrounding her, she
looks over the screen out the window at the clear blue sky. She has never seen
this exact colour of sky before, the blue is almost an aquamarine, but then
again it is more of a sea blue, or maybe it is more of a turquoise.
From the corner of her eye, she notices that the computer is ready for her, all her personal settings initialized.
Absent-mindedly she folds her hand over the mouse, moving
the white arrow across the screen. She double-clicks the button to open the
Internet icon.
Immediately the screen opens and then she waits patiently
while the computer waits for the page to load – website found, waiting for
reply.
She thinks frustrated that it is time to upgrade to a faster
computer. She spends most of her day waiting and she feels as if she is forever
waiting for pages to open, waiting for documents to print, waiting, waiting,
and always waiting.
How much time is wasted waiting? Yes, she now saves time by
not standing in long queues at the bank, because she can do all her banking
on-line. She saves time not waiting at the checkout, because now she can buy
everything her heart desires off the Internet, with only a knock on the door
announcing that it has arrived. All her friends now are avatars.
She really uses the Internet mainly as a giant public
library, searching for information on travel, hobbies, places of interest and
general information. She also does some emailing to keep in contact with her
family.
Although they say that the Internet is also an entertainment
dome, playing virtual chess and other games against unknown challengers, she
has never attempted this. She has also never downloaded music, a television
program, a movie, or a book, preferring the old-fashioned method.
Only once, did she enter a chat room, but felt inadequate.
They all spoke so fast, in as few letters as possible and still to this day,
she does not know what they were trying to say. She felt ousted and nobody
bothered chatting with her anyway. Just imagine, a world where she could be
unpopular although no one knew whom she was, what she looked like or her real
name. She logged off, embarrassed. Chat rooms are mainly for the young - under
twenty-five-year-old - in her opinion.
The Internet has been around only for a few years now and
they say that people are already losing contact with their physical social
environment, using the telephone less; it is easier to send a mail. People are
reading fewer newspapers, watching less television, and spending longer and
longer hours surfing the net, thus spending less time in shopping stores and
commuting in traffic to and from shops.
Marlene works Monday to Friday at a job she loathes with a
passion. She wakes up with aches and pains, tired and in real need of more
sleep. She often wonders how funny it is that on a weekend she awakes fresh,
invigorated, able to take on the world, but come Monday, the world rests
heavily on her shoulders.
Eventually the page opens in front of her, and she
double-clicks on the link that will take her to her email provider. She enters
her username, her password and then reaching with her pinkie she pushes the
enter button.
Once again, she waits while the page loads. Normally she
would open another page while she waits for one page, but today she does not
feel like multi-tasking and besides, it only slows down her computer, bought
only last year, but already seriously outdated.
Her mailbox opens and she has seventeen unread messages. She
notices most of these are from companies, companies she orders from, or that
she once had a query about and completed her email address into the field
provided and now, she is on their mailing list, a valued customer.
There are only two emails she will bother opening, the one
from her daughter, Lisa, and then the one from her daughter-in-law, Adèle.
Lisa now lives in England with her husband and Marlene’s two
grandchildren, Paul and E’lisa. Lisa only wrote a few cursory lines, as usual.
Lisa says they are well, the weather is awful and that she
is frightfully busy. Marlene considers amused that Lisa almost sounds as
pompous as only the English can. Lisa continues, promising that she will attach
photos the next time she mails. Marlene has heard this many times before and
never has she seen the icon indicating that a mail from Lisa has an attachment.
Sighing Marlene moves the email to the folder named Lisa;
she will reply tomorrow.
She selects all the mails from the companies she has no intention of reading and moves them to her trash folder.
Double-clicking on Adèle’s email, Marlene notices too late the three letters FWD in the subject-field. Softly she swears under her breath. She hates these emails with a passion; emails that need to be forwarded or you will encounter doom. Admittedly she does not forward them all and none of the doom prophecies has come true, such as if you delete this mail, your left foot will rot, start to stink and fall off within one week. Low-and-behold she still has both her feet.
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