Tuesday 25th March

Before I left the office on Tuesday I went through the mail boxes of my e-mail account and deleted the lot. It was amazingly satisfying to point the mouse at the top of the list, jam the left hand button down hard and drag the whole incoherent mess into electronic limbo. After spending ten minutes or so blasting away I discovered the command on the mail box menu that allowed the user to destroy all the messages at once when they deleted the box. I decided to ignore it and instead went back to deleting messages individually. This was now personal.

Over the previous three weeks the e-mail traffic on my account had been rising sharply. Since this was a work account I had been getting increasingly worried about the time it was taking even to check out the new messages. I get into the office at 08:30 and it was reaching the point that simply reading my e-mail was taking until 09:15. As I get very little e-mail professionally this was beginning to get noticed. If nothing else the disk space being taken up was alarming.

At 16:30 on Tuesday I reached the deadline. I would be leaving the office in half an hour and it was too late for anymore e-mail. At home I had already unplugged the Telephone Answering Machine as I was not planning to be back home until 23:00 and had no intention of being sober at that stage. The following day I would be up betimes (well at 05:00) and away to the fair land of Liverpool.