So Here’s the Thing…: Notes on Growing Up, Getting Older, and Trusting Your Gut(29)

1 Not her real name. “Jessica” was not her name, either.

2 This story is from many years ago, when both Doug and I were not so smart. He’s now a wonderful husband and father and one of my dearest friends, who has supported me in countless ways since we broke up. For more on the inspiration for our post-breakup friendship, see page 139.





“Tell Alyssa She Needs to Get Better at Email”



I didn’t start using the internet seriously until I graduated from college, and part of me still thinks it would be good to implement this as a policy somehow. You can’t log on until you’ve been legally drinking for at least one year. That way you have personal experience with the kind of trouble you can get into on social media. Until then it’s hard to understand things like recklessness, how easy it is to know something is bad but do it anyway, headaches, and the way a snap decision made in the heat of the emotional moment when several friends and strangers are screaming around you can have a lasting impact on your well-being.

My introduction to the internet was anticlimactic. We got email at UVM, but no one knew what it was good for or how to use it. All the universities used to have quirky non sequiturs in their email addresses; ours was “gnu,” as in the large antelope. I knew what it was because of Gary Gnu on the ’80s kids show The Great Space Coaster; Gary was the host of a news show and his tagline was “Gno gnews is good gnews.” My address was something like “[email protected].” Occasional reminders from professors or the student union would pop up in my inbox, which had all the design flair of a filing cabinet, but it wasn’t somewhere to camp out from the moment you woke up until the moment you fell asleep like it is now. It didn’t seem like there was anything to do.

Until I discovered tape trading.1

As you may know, I love the Grateful Dead. I also love God Street Wine, and other jam bands you may not even be able to google at this point. I don’t remember how I realized I could use the internet to facilitate this passion of mine, but I got involved in forums, where in addition to lively discussions about whom you’d met in the parking lot at Wetlands, you could request tapes. Sometimes you’d send a person a blank tape and they’d dub it for you and send it back; other times you’d trade. The borderline indecipherable lingo we used—“blistering version of ’91 NYE Rhinecliff Hotel trade for tapes of any Dead shows from Autzen Stadium”—lived on the internet for many years. But every time I look at Twitter or Instagram—which is much more often than I’d like to admit—I’m grateful that my hippie passion for extended guitar is the extent of the digital residue available from my most potentially embarrassing years.

After I graduated, the internet started feeling more important. When I got a job as a paralegal in the World Trade Center, we were given email accounts and used them mainly to discuss edits on documents. It wasn’t really used socially—people were pretty cautious. But as time went on they got less cautious, as people tend to do.

One day my best friend in the office, Volpe, was emailing me about “GPB,” one of the lawyers who was senior to us but wasn’t our direct supervisor. Volpe had a crush on him, and we were trying to determine whether he liked her back. We all thought the lawyers were sexy and important until the company instituted casual Fridays and their uniform of rugby shirts tucked into khaki pants disabused us of that myth. Weirdly, GPB’s constant references to “flip and chug” didn’t convince Volpe he was unworthy before. They’d been out for drinks, and he once came over to help us hang up a shelf.

The situation we were dissecting at the time was an email he’d sent her, so she forwarded it to me to ask me what I thought of its significance. I thought it was significant and I wrote back something funny.

Although we were emailing, our cubicles were so close that we could see each other; we were all grouped in an enclosed area known as the Para Pit. When we wanted/needed to procrastinate we used to just stand up—the cubicles were like four feet high—and start gossiping or talking about movies or the news. (I think people were a lot more interesting back then—now sometimes I start talking about an article and I can tell everyone around me has only read the headline. Back in the day the headlines were not so descriptive as to lull you into a false sense of comprehension!) When I didn’t hear her cackle at my joke moments after I sent it, I was alarmed.

I stood up and peered over my cube. “Volpe, did you get my last email?” I asked, already panicked. No. I checked my sent mail; of course, somehow, because of our pre-2000 technology, I had replied to GPB and not to Volpe. Crisis mode. Our friend Bama said he knew how to “recall” emails. Recall the email! Recall the email! I felt so guilty.

Turns out, he absolutely did not know how to recall the email.

Volpe was admirably calm in spite of my betrayal. Finally, the IT guys told us they managed to somehow wrench the telltale message from cyberspace before GPB could open it. But months later, Volpe ran into the lawyer in Boston, and as she was leaving he said, “Tell Alyssa she needs to get better at email.” I’m pretty sure she’s forgiven me, but she still brings it up.

Since then, I’ve been fairly relentless about my virtual communication practices, not only so that information doesn’t get into the wrong hands but also so that I don’t find myself annoying my friends and colleagues by wasting their time: