I've been computer literate since high school. For some of the young 'uns reading this journal, that statement does not sound very significant. But for someone who graduated high school in 1974, it is a statement ahead of its time. I have programmed in BASIC, created and tweaked complex databases for my office back in the days of the original Macintoshes, and discovered forums when ASCII was all the rage. I use email and I like email.

But something has happened and it has happened to people who are newer to computers than I am. I'm not talking about spam. Spam is the intentional misuse of email. I'm not talking about those friends or relatives who forward urban legends and bad jokes either. No, they should know better but they are at least trying to be thoughtful in an erroneous way. No, I'm talking about people who use email to hide.

When I got the first email with the heading "C. died," I chalked the phenomenon up to the particular author, a woman with poor social skills. She knew that C is a close friend of Mr. Philately's and that he has been an adopted uncle to my children but she still thought it okay to send an email like that, probably because it was easier than picking up the phone. I wonder if it occurred to her that one of my children might have seen the email before me. There are few secrets in email in this house when you send to the general account.

It was the second email about C's death that really got to me. The second email did not have "died" or "dead" in the subject line but that was the only improvement. Once again, the email was from someone who knew we were close to C and who was assuming that we had not heard the news. Once again, it was from someone who had our telephone number. This time, however, it was from someone who generally has good social skills.

So is this where we have arrived? Is it suddenly okay to take the easy way and to email news of deaths? Have we found the ultimate way to use a computer to distance ourselves?

Oh, and I won't be sending you a email to inform you of this but good sense about computers apparently has died. If you want to spread the news, I suggest your subject line read "death." It's all the rage these days.

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