Interlude: Important Emails, Extended Cut
Friends, hello and welcome to Never Post, a podcast about and for the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta, and this upload is not a full episode. Illness has laid waste to the Neverpost team, and some of their families. Colds and flus and so on have put a number of us in rest and or caregiver mode, so the audio production is gonna have to wait. We're a small team, we love making the show, but we gotta take care of ourselves and our loved ones, so we can keep making it over the long term.
Mike Rugnetta:So we're gonna push the release of episode 7 back a couple days. It is well underway, and once everyone is feeling a 100%, we're gonna have it uploaded for you. In the interim, we thought it would be fun to share an extended cut of one of our most popular segments. The one we refer to as the weight of email. This conversation begins with a very simple question.
Mike Rugnetta:If you're writing an email that you deem important, whatever that means to you, do you feel like you can't send it from your phone? And whatever the answer is, why? Why do you feel that way? Me, Hans, Jason, and Georgia discuss at length what follows is about 15 minutes longer than the segment cut that ended up in the public episode. If you enjoy this, most segments on the show have extended versions made available to members a week after an episode is published.
Mike Rugnetta:You can head over to never poe.st to see about becoming a member, to support us making the show, and to get access to extended segments and side shows like posts from the field, our field recording podcast. Slow post, where you can listen to my AI voice clone read you Wikipedia entries to help you fall asleep. And never watch the watch along podcast where we've just uploaded audio of the staff watching the Sandra Bullock masterpiece, The Net. That was it's a it's a blast. It's a lot of fun.
Mike Rugnetta:Members, if you happen to be listening on the public feed, do not worry. We're gonna have something special for you as well while we sort out episode 7. But here, now, after a word from our current cross promotional partners, the weight of emails.
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Mike Rugnetta:I'm here with Jason, Georgia, and Hans. Hello, friends.
Jason Oberholtzer:Hello. Hello.
Mike Rugnetta:How are you?
Georgia Hampton:I'm here. I'm awake. I'm thriving, and I'm learning. I'm
Mike Rugnetta:at least
Jason Oberholtzer:one of those things.
Georgia Hampton:And I'm the other 2.
Mike Rugnetta:So I have gathered you all here because I have a question for you and I would like your opinion on various things. And, there's a little bit of background to this. Recently I, wrote a big email to a client. This was like a big sort of important asking for things. You know, spent a long time making sure that it was worded right, all this other stuff.
Mike Rugnetta:And sent it and then a few hours later, went out to dinner with Molly. And we're on the train going into Manhattan and my phone dings and it's a response to the email. And so so I read it and they're like, yeah, this is great. Like all all good, accepted, deadline, good, budget, good, whatever. And I was like, ah, yes.
Mike Rugnetta:Great. She said, write them back. Say to them, you know, like received great. Can't wait till, you know, whatever. Whatever you would say in that reply email.
Mike Rugnetta:And I said, oh no no. I can't do that. I'm only on my phone. And she said, right. Millennial.
Mike Rugnetta:Which Molly is Molly is also a millennial, so skating.
Georgia Hampton:The call is coming from inside the house.
Mike Rugnetta:You can only write an important email on the computer. And I want to know, just to get started, if this is a way that you all also feel because I was not aware this was a thing when Molly said it.
Georgia Hampton:Oh, I do all of my textual exchange on the computer. I prefer texting on the computer Oh. Because I can type so much faster.
Jason Oberholtzer:That is both practical and feels totally wild to me, the text part.
Georgia Hampton:Oh my god. No. I like I I I've had, like, multiple conversations with people where I'm, like, if I'm talking to them, for example, on Instagram, like, on DMs on Instagram, I'll be like, just here's my number, text me. I prefer texting on a computer.
Jason Oberholtzer:Okay.
Georgia Hampton:I'm, like, the only person I know who does this.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. I mean, I I I wanna hear from Jason and Hans.
Georgia Hampton:That's it, guys. You can leave.
Mike Rugnetta:But, George, I but, George, I got a lot of questions for you. One one of them is, could you have a seat over here?
Georgia Hampton:Okay. Listen. It is a bigger screen. It is a bigger keyboard. You have everything there.
Georgia Hampton:You can see it all at the same time. It's just it's just better. Like, I I'm I'm right. No. It is
Jason Oberholtzer:better. My, litmus test is always, do I think I'm going to need tabs? Is there something I need to look at while writing this? And if the answer is remotely yes, then it's a computer for me. I can handle one page.
Jason Oberholtzer:If it is just tabbing over to 1 page on a browser and tabbing back to what I'm writing, I can do that on a phone but that is the absolute limit. If more than one page or, like, a separate email and a web page need to be looked at to do this job, no shot of doing it on the phone. Interesting.
Hans Buetow:Mike, I have questions for
Mike Rugnetta:you. Okay. Sure.
Hans Buetow:Is it you're worried your little fingers, your little thumbs can't go that fast? Are you worried you're gonna autocorrect? Because autocorrect is a real thing on the phone that, like, can misinterpret you. Like, that could be a reason. Is it, like Yeah.
Hans Buetow:The information is too important for the smallness of the device? Like, what where does that come from for you?
Mike Rugnetta:I think there are a couple things. And I wanna stress that like, I write emails on my phone all the time. But like, there's a certain kind of email, a certain echelon of email that I'm like, I gotta do this on a computer. And I I think part of it is, for whatever reason, that echelon of email should not have the literal markers of being written on a phone. Like, you know, sent from my sent from mobile or type mine is typed using only my thumbs.
Mike Rugnetta:And there's no reason for that, I think, other than, like, my individual taste. Like, I just prefer that if it is an important email, it shouldn't have those things on it. And I am not confident in myself in finding all of the settings, both within iOS and the Gmail app to turn them all off. Mhmm. And also I don't want to.
Mike Rugnetta:I'm just lazy. To, like, go turn them off, write the important email, turn them back on later. You know? Because I think there is some utility in knowing that the message that you've written came from a mobile device sometimes. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:Sometimes I do think it's a mark of importance. Like, I'm out in the world doing things, and I'm I'm emailing you back. That's how important this is. But that's like a different kind of importance, I think.
Hans Buetow:That's like the urgency. The importance of urgency.
Georgia Hampton:Yes. Exactly.
Mike Rugnetta:I also like I think that email rules are are silly for the most part. Like, only include one exclamation mark. Make sure that you blah blah blah. You know, like all these things of, like, to write a professional email, you must follow these very strict sort of like, style ideas. I think most of them are bad.
Mike Rugnetta:However, for whatever reason, I think a lot about how an email looks when you first open it.
Hans Buetow:To the other person. Yes. To the other person. Getting it from Mike. Like, oh, Mike sent me something.
Hans Buetow:Whoop. What do I see? Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:And what and the feeling that I want someone to have is I'm gonna read this email. Not, oh my god. And and so that for me, the the the facets of that are like overall email length, length of section between new line breaks, and length of sentences.
Hans Buetow:Mhmm.
Mike Rugnetta:And I just visually feel like I have a harder time getting a grasp on how an email feels overall on a smaller screen.
Hans Buetow:Because you can only fit so many words into that,
Georgia Hampton:and you have to scroll up
Hans Buetow:and scroll down and remember, and you can't get the full scope of it by looking.
Mike Rugnetta:And I think part of it also is is a little bit of anxiety of being like, on the small screen, it always feels too long to me because of because of how much I'm scrolling and going back and forth. And I just you know, I don't know. Maybe it's my brain. Maybe it's just like I wrote a 1000000000 emails before iPhones even existed, and so it's just my anchor point is different. Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer:It's like a sense memory of that email. Yeah. I I identify with that so much. You've articulated something that I was feeling but had not actually thought about. Is that like the construction the physical construction of an email and the proportions of it are something that I understand on a computer screen and are important to me to figure out if this email is successful in some way that's hard to articulate and scrolling up and down on a phone to try to figure that out is terrifying and I'm not confident that I can do it.
Hans Buetow:It's an aesthetic choice as much as a formal choice? I think so.
Jason Oberholtzer:So tied to the concept of a successful email to me. I just know it will work if it feels proportionally correct.
Hans Buetow:I have another clarifying question because you're using the word important, but I want us to define important a little bit more. Sure. Sure. Because I feel like we're we're conflating a little bit what might be a Venn diagram of important and formal.
Mike Rugnetta:Oh. Interesting. So one of my jobs is I do what is effectively like artist services for a music technology company, where, like, I'm reaching out to artists and I'm often, like, commissioning work from them. And those emails are not formal. But they are important, and I would never send one on my phone.
Hans Buetow:Okay. Okay. Interesting. What are the markers of them that you make you say they're not formal?
Mike Rugnetta:I think they're they're conversational. Like, it's Okay. You know, it's talking about people's work, it's talking about collaborating, it's, you know, figuring out the ins and outs of, working together with someone and, you know, making things and sometimes providing, like, tech support and stuff like that. But it is still discussing work that someone has to do, deadlines. The details are important, and I gotta make sure I get them right.
Mike Rugnetta:You know what I mean?
Hans Buetow:That's a that feels like a big one that is hard to do on a phone.
Mike Rugnetta:I gotta make sure it's I gotta make sure everything's communicated very clearly because, like, I'm the representative of this company, like yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer:And that sounds like you you're gonna need some tabs to make extra sure you can get those things sorted.
Georgia Hampton:Yeah. Yeah. About those tabs though. Yeah. I mean, this to me is also a a word that I'm thinking of thinking about this is, like, a degree of respect and and professionalism.
Georgia Hampton:I mean, I don't know if that's dangerous. I know.
Hans Buetow:Keep going, Georgia.
Mike Rugnetta:Break it down.
Georgia Hampton:Never mind. I don't wanna
Mike Rugnetta:talk about it anymore.
Hans Buetow:No. No. No.
Georgia Hampton:I want a duo. Keep going. I well, but I'm thinking also of, like, the notion of professionalism in regards to this aesthetic design question here. I'm still very hung up on a part of this that has also pinged a discomfort I've been feeling and haven't really been able to identify the source of, which is the the copy, the design, these elements of little filigree that's added to your digital communication only on your phone. So, like, what, Mike, you were saying if, like, sent from my iPhone or whatever, like, that just I I don't have to think about that if I'm on a computer, and there's so many little versions of that.
Georgia Hampton:Even I mean, god, Hans, the the evocation of autocorrect, I'm sweating. I'm nervous. I'm scared.
Mike Rugnetta:Because I
Georgia Hampton:don't know I don't always notice it,
Hans Buetow:and then I don't get it until later, and I'm like, oh, or, like, proper nouns that I Yes. Intended. I'm working on a story for another show where it's all about blobfish, and autocorrect is always putting it to blowfish. It's a small change, but that's not the word. I mean
Mike Rugnetta:That's a different thing.
Hans Buetow:It's a different thing. And I don't always notice when it does it.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. Can we sidebar for a moment and just acknowledge to one another I feel like I think I need this sanity check. IPhone specifically, autocorrect has steadily gotten worse and worse and worse over the last decade. To the point where now, I feel like I'm fighting my phone to type what I wanna say. Yes.
Hans Buetow:Worse in what way to what are you seeing that's worse? Is it auto correcting more things or the things that corrects it gets more wrong? So Or both.
Mike Rugnetta:So I got so frustrated about a year ago. I turned autocorrect completely off. It's just it's just off. And I just do, sometimes I I I keep up the word suggestions, and I use swipe to type. Oh.
Mike Rugnetta:So I'm drawing so I'm drawing lines. Woah. And I never got good at that. And what it thinks I am trying to say when, at least I think, I am typing something extremely obvious is often maddening. I should have I should keep track of them because none of them are coming right to mind, but it's, I think very easily summarized by a problem that was prevalent maybe like 2 years ago, which was the abd problem, which is that so many people had, from what I understand and and, listeners will correct me if I have misunderstood this story.
Mike Rugnetta:But my understanding was that so many people had accidentally typed a b d instead of a n d. Oh. That the autocorrect brain started to think that was a word. And so it would autocorrect and to.
Georgia Hampton:Oh my god.
Mike Rugnetta:And that and that in iOS 17, they've actually built in a number of things on the back end to address these kinds of problems because they did not previously exist. Because the autocorrect just learns from what everybody's typing. Okay. So okay. I'm not insane though.
Mike Rugnetta:No. I don't think you're insane. It's worse. Okay.
Jason Oberholtzer:A thing that I have noticed is that, the autocorrect will not catch or be confused by a near miss spelling in such a way that makes me completely forget how to spell the word I was going for. Because it won't make the small change to get it to where it was, which makes me then rethink everything I thought I knew about that word and have to go to Google to type in the worst version of that word to get to what it would what it actually is spelled like to put that in.
Mike Rugnetta:Like, typing conceit with a g for some reason. You're
Jason Oberholtzer:Conceive. Dude, conceit was literally the word in my head. That's uncanny.
Mike Rugnetta:I'm in there.
Jason Oberholtzer:Something like that. You know, you flip the e and the I or something and you hope it corrects it, but instead it sends you to a different essentially, like, concept. Yeah. And then, like, no. And then you do it again or whatever.
Jason Oberholtzer:And then, like, wait. Is that the right order? And then I'm, like, oh, does concede have an s in the middle? And you start to just get completely get thrown off the fucking planet.
Georgia Hampton:C o n s s e p p t.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. Yeah. What language log, years ago coined the Cupertino effect for words that would get switched to the incorrect word by autocorrect and then would, like, go to publish. So you would be reading things where, you know, it should've been conceit, but it was concept. There should be another phrase for or another coinage for the, increasing self doubt that you can speak and type your own language because Apple is like, no.
Mike Rugnetta:You mean this.
Georgia Hampton:Yeah. Concept. Conceptual.
Mike Rugnetta:Conceit? Never heard of it.
Georgia Hampton:I don't know what that word even means.
Mike Rugnetta:So, okay. I wanna get us back to emails and I wanna ask, a relatively big question, which is informed by, some research that I did before starting this round table. I was reading last night about just like generational email norms. So it's like, baby boomers include GIFs or, like, images and, like, have quotes in their email signatures. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:Gen x doesn't capitalize anything. There's no punctuation. Their emails are very short. Gen z just doesn't send emails. I mean But void.
Mike Rugnetta:And one thing I learned about millennials is that this preference to send emails on a larger device is the majority preference for our cohort. Something like 60% of millennials prefer to send email on a computer. In a similar, in a similar thing, I I read basically this claim, that was millennials think more about emails than any of these other generations.
Hans Buetow:Mhmm.
Mike Rugnetta:I mean, it's so stereotypical, but like, this was the way it was framed. Something we are anxious about. Oh. Do you think that's true? Absolutely.
Mike Rugnetta:Okay. What? Go on.
Hans Buetow:We we it it is just as much as other forms of, like, the social Internet are the marker and lifestyle of people who grew up with its nascence, we grew up with the nascence of email. Email was the new thing. I'm guessing that most people of our generation, I am 41, and an email address was my first internet experience and that primacy of it was validated by its use in business for 20 years, 30 years. It's still when you work for corporations or communicate in formalized ways, it's still the preferred way of communicating. I think that it's got a reification that happens, plus we grew up alongside it, and so it's a peer.
Georgia Hampton:See, this is where tragically, I think I differ from you guys a little bit.
Mike Rugnetta:Georgia, are you you are a millennial. Right? I don't know where the cutoff is.
Georgia Hampton:I am. I think the cutoff is 1997.
Mike Rugnetta:Okay.
Georgia Hampton:I I was born in 1993.
Mike Rugnetta:Okay.
Georgia Hampton:But that being said, I am definitely closer. Like, I'm a millennial. I'm not gonna pretend I'm not, but there are components of my upbringing and my relationship especially to the Internet that I do find myself aligning a little bit more with Gen z, not completely, but I mean, Hans, I think you're right. I I was also thinking about this of, like, well, email was sort of in its infancy, nascency, like, going through that first era of its its existence in a way that was very essential for us, but my relationship with email is not nearly as close. Like, my memory of the first sort of online communication handle address, whatever that I had was, like, my AIM username.
Hans Buetow:Yeah.
Georgia Hampton:And I certainly like, I obviously send a lot of emails. Don't mean to brag, but, sorry, guys.
Mike Rugnetta:I sent a couple emails in Monday.
Georgia Hampton:This girl, oh, she's sending emails, but I am definitely of the camp of, like, why don't you just text me? The the equivalent to me of, like, this meeting could be an email is this email could be a text. And I run into this, frankly, more in my personal life because my parents who are boomers, always email me as, like, kind of texting me to be like, George, are you coming home for your friend's baby shower? Ellipses.
Hans Buetow:Like a one line email. Yes. Yes.
Mike Rugnetta:Minion meme?
Georgia Hampton:Yeah. Minion meme. Yeah. Like, they are much more connected to email as, like, if I'm going to communicate with my daughter, this is the first way I'm going to do it. Email to me if we really bring it back to this notion of formality or importance.
Georgia Hampton:If you're emailing me, I'm kind of assuming that this has some kind of professional tone to it, if that makes sense. Like, I hardly know any of my friends' email addresses because I don't need to email them about anything.
Hans Buetow:Yeah. I agree. I think that's true. I
Jason Oberholtzer:yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I have a question.
Jason Oberholtzer:The best kind of question starts with me talking about myself.
Mike Rugnetta:When I ask, it's more of a comment. It's more of an anecdote, really.
Jason Oberholtzer:In thinking about correspondences that were primarily email, of which there are none in my life right now, but there used to be when I was younger, a fair amount of folks, the primary method of communication we had was email. And they were correspondences. They were long form. They were considered. They went back and forth every week to month to if we were at in a fever pitch, maybe, you know, once a day or something, but they were thought out.
Jason Oberholtzer:They were basically electronic letters. I don't use email like that anymore. One can speculate a variety of reasons, both technological and personal and aging or whatever. But that behavior has not ported over to any other platform. And I wonder if it has for others.
Jason Oberholtzer:Does anyone do long form on text or on any of these other places?
Mike Rugnetta:There is a way that texting, for me now, resembles, if not in scope, then in, content, talking on the phone when I was, like 13. Mhmm. Which is like there are a number of people where, I would consider them friends, but like for the most part, we only ever communicate via text message. We have long, ongoing, back and forth via text. None of it's long form.
Mike Rugnetta:Like, we're not writing letters to one another, but it's like, you know, texting multiple times a week just about, like, what sort of stuff is going on in our lives and like funny jokes and things that we see on the internet that make us think of each other. Sometimes I get, like, hey, wow. How you doing? Here's what I'm up to. What are you up to?
Mike Rugnetta:Messages on LinkedIn.
Georgia Hampton:I was gonna I
Hans Buetow:thought that was coming.
Jason Oberholtzer:All roads lead.
Mike Rugnetta:And that I like, I respond to those, but it's always, like, hey, good. Working in media. Got a kid. Nice to see you. Bye.
Mike Rugnetta:Because, like, I don't you know.
Georgia Hampton:Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:But I think but like I have what you say rings true to me, Jason. That like there were there were times, probably like 15 years ago, where I would like have back and forth with someone who I knew via email. And, yeah, you would write like maybe a page
Jason Oberholtzer:Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:That sort of went away and hasn't really come up anywhere else.
Georgia Hampton:The closest thing I can think of that I certainly use, my friends certainly use, is sending voice memos because my friends and I it it it's definitely dependent on the situation, but I have friends who when we're texting, sometimes we'll just switch over to voice memo and send each other voice memos instead, or if we're sharing something and we're walking or we're sharing something that's an especially long story, what we'll do instead of texting it out is send a, like, 8 minute long voice memo.
Mike Rugnetta:Woah. Yeah. Yeah. That's just a podcast.
Georgia Hampton:Listen. It kind of is. I'm like, oh, just gotta pop my headphones on. But but, yeah, I mean, in terms of this long form component to it, that that's the closest approximation I have in my life.
Jason Oberholtzer:Probably about 5 plus years ago, Mike, your wife Molly took a text conversation to voice memo midway through the conversation, and I texted her back, I'm not doing this.
Georgia Hampton:She did the first and I was, like, great. Molly Molly
Mike Rugnetta:is a famous user of, yeah, of, voice messages. Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer:It's the first and last time anyone tried.
Georgia Hampton:You said no.
Mike Rugnetta:Speak to the phone?
Jason Oberholtzer:On my Saturday?
Georgia Hampton:In front of my salad? I speak
Mike Rugnetta:into microphone for work, and it is weekend.
Hans Buetow:I have a side question that we haven't really talked about from Mike's original question. Yep. We've talked a lot about the technology and the ways that the technology affects what you do, which of course reminds me of Walter Murch, In a Blink of an Eye, amazing book and in this he has an essay, Methods and Machines. Walter Murch famously the, inventor of sound design, and one of the most incredible film sound designers and sound sound designers, to have ever lived, and a great theorist about science sound. And in this essay, Methods and Machines, from his book, In the Blink of an Eye, he talks about how much the machine changes what you do.
Hans Buetow:The first line of the essay is, the tools that you choose to edit with can have a determining effect on the final product. Meaning that he uses different editing machines to have different choices, to do different things, to have different results depending on what he needs out of the film. Which I think ties what we're saying and what we've been talking about, but there's a whole other component that I'm really curious about because you started that story on the train. And is there anything about not the technology that you're using, but the location on which you find yourself that feels like it's too casual, that there's something about the formality of sitting in front of a designated spot, which is what a computer usually is, or few spots. To do this, is there an environmental thing?
Hans Buetow:Like, would you ever send an urgent email on the toilet? I
Mike Rugnetta:not to keep bringing up Molly, but I guess she was, like, the the genesis of this whole discussion in a way. Molly makes fun of me sometimes because she will ask me a question, and my response will be, I'm not ready to think about that
Georgia Hampton:yet. Like boundaries.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. Like, sometimes, like, you know, she would, like, wanna make plans. She would be like, what should we have for dinner tonight? And it'll be like 2 o'clock in the afternoon and I'll be like, I'm not I can't put my brain there yet. Like I'm not there yet.
Hans Buetow:Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:And it's like too much work to get there.
Jason Oberholtzer:Yep.
Mike Rugnetta:And I think that I do feel that to a certain degree, when I am working, I am like, I'm in the studio, I'm in front of the computer, brain is in a certain mode Yeah. And certain other things become more, facile. Facile? That's is that the right word? Certain things become easier.
Jason Oberholtzer:Yeah. Don't ask autocorrect.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. Because yeah. There's an a in
Georgia Hampton:there. Did you mean duck?
Mike Rugnetta:Always. Always. Certain things become easier just because of, 1, the attitude that I'm able to inhabit in a particular place, and also because, like, it's very material. Like, all the stuff is in the right place. Like the yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:Like Georgia said, the keyboard is easier to type on. The mouse is always in the same spot. Everything's big on the screen. You know, like, the the studio monitors are here so I can listen to loud music and, like, blot out everything else that's distracting me. I think that, yeah, it's harder to get into that same frame of mind on the train on the way to date night, where I'm like, Oh, gotta change gears, and it really does feel like doing a Stady 180 on the highway.
Mike Rugnetta:However, to answer your question directly, would I send an important or urgent email from the toilet? Is the question on a phone specifically or on any device?
Hans Buetow:I mean, I'm hoping the phone is maybe the most you're taking to the toilet with you, but this is not I'm not gonna judge.
Mike Rugnetta:I mean, I've never I've never sent an important email from the toilet on a laptop, but it doesn't seem insane to me. Just bring a tower
Georgia Hampton:in there. Just get a whole set up. Please, honey. I'm gaming.
Mike Rugnetta:I have some important business to attend to.
Jason Oberholtzer:Sending emails from my Oculus, honey.
Hans Buetow:I have kind of the same reaction you do, Mike, but kind maybe for different reasons. I think I have a defense, like, I want it to be in the computer because the computer is where I do business.
Jason Oberholtzer:Yeah. Yeah.
Hans Buetow:And I feel like I don't want an email. I don't wanna not only is it hard to put my brain into that space on the way to date night, I don't want that in my brain on the way to date night. I wanna be on date night.
Jason Oberholtzer:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel similarly about, being on the toilet. I don't wanna also have to do my job.
Georgia Hampton:Yes. Yes. Yeah. I can only think of very situation specific moments in which that would happen, and it would truly have to be, like, I need to send this out. Yeah.
Georgia Hampton:Let's say I'm I'm at a party. I don't wanna do this, but if I'm in the bathroom, at least I'm kind of in a little room by myself and can be left alone to be like, oh, god. Okay. Hey.
Mike Rugnetta:So great to hear from you.
Georgia Hampton:That sounds that sounds great. I will have that to you by EOD, all my best. Yeah. And then delete, you know, sent from my iPhone, delete all traces. But but truly, the only time I could think of doing that would be under duress.
Georgia Hampton:Otherwise, I would just wait and respond to something later.
Mike Rugnetta:Okay. So I feel like we've learned a lot about each other's email preferences. Wanna return to something that, we talked about at the top of this conversation, which is Georgia typing texts on her computer.
Georgia Hampton:I knew it. I knew you were going to come for me. I knew it. I can't believe this.
Mike Rugnetta:1, what's wrong with you? 2 You're gonna Oh
Georgia Hampton:my god. Oh my god. Oh my gosh.
Mike Rugnetta:I think this is interesting because, like, I think a lot about the weight of posts. Like, a text to me is a relatively light post. An email is a relatively for the most part, usually, a relatively heavy, quote unquote, post. A tweet is like somewhere between those 2. A blog post is, like, closer to an email and sometimes heavier than an email depending upon what it is.
Mike Rugnetta:And I think I just think that typing texts on a keyboard, like, elevates them in weight in a way that I think is very interesting.
Jason Oberholtzer:Alright. So here's the question then. I'm assuming that your texts, all of you, come to your computers and your phones at the same time. Yes. Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer:When you are sitting there at your desk and a text comes in
Hans Buetow:Yeah.
Jason Oberholtzer:What percentage of the time do you answer on your desktop or pick up your phone to answer it?
Hans Buetow:This is a good question.
Georgia Hampton:You already know my answer to that question.
Jason Oberholtzer:Question. The phone is left in the bedroom. It has not made its way to the desk.
Georgia Hampton:The only exception to that I mean, there are definitely exceptions to that. I'm not, like, carrying my computer to, like, the CTA being like, oh, gotta respond to some text. But for example, if I need to send a photo of something for my camera roll, if I Right. If I need to edit a text, I can't do that on my computer. For some reason, the software, like, hasn't updated to be able to do that on the computer.
Georgia Hampton:So if I sent something and god, this is such a dumb editorial thing. If there's a double space there and it drives me crazy, I alright. Mike?
Mike Rugnetta:You are you are just, you are are proving my hypothesis here that you think of texts as being weightier than the rest of us.
Georgia Hampton:Listen. Grammar and syntax are important to me, and I won't apologize for that. But, yeah, like, if I have to if I if it is easier to do it on a phone or if I need to have access to things that are in my phone, I will absolutely send it on my phone.
Mike Rugnetta:I I think I feel the same way. The the, Imessage app on desktop is so miserable that if I need to do anything other than just send a text, like respond to someone, write write text, then I'm gonna go get my phone.
Hans Buetow:Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:But, like, I do agree with you. Like, I hate Apple autocorrect. Typing on the iPhone is also miserable. Mhmm. So like
Georgia Hampton:So so I'm right.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. It's better.
Georgia Hampton:So I'm right. So you agree?
Mike Rugnetta:If if you need if you need this, then
Georgia Hampton:yes.
Mike Rugnetta:Okay, friends. Thank you for letting me gather you, to ask you about your email practices and preferences. My pleasure.
Georgia Hampton:I don't know if it was my pleasure.
Mike Rugnetta:I don't know. Yeah. Have we done ourselves a disservice by being millennials and then just sitting here now, staring into the abyss of thinking about email? Thanks for listening. If you have thoughts about emails, please call us at 651-615-50007.
Mike Rugnetta:Email us at the never post atgmail.com. Leave us a voice memo via Airtable, link in the show notes, or write us a comment on the website at neverpo.st. We will be back in the main feed as soon as possible with the next episode, which is our first fully themed episode, which kinda happened by mistake, to be honest, but we just sort of ran with it, and it's turning out to be really fun. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto.
Mike Rugnetta:Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer. And the show's host is me. I'm Mike Rugnetta. It's easier to read the mind of a fox than to guess what a man's about to say when he returns from the woods. Head full of roots, veins more like branches, shoes in one hand, feet blistered.
Mike Rugnetta:And none of this necessarily an indication of how the feet feel, what miles uphill and back have done to the soles and to the small bones that propel a man. Excerpt of Rest Before You Sleep by Dionisio De Martinez. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure.
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