WIP.CRACKER

I just hit the button on my first email promotion. As I rolled up to that, my heart was pounding, my palms were sweating, my whole body felt light and there was a buzzing in my head.

Maybe, just maybe it was that third cup of coffee this morning.

More likely, it was terror. I checked the thing 39486120463476 times, but there could still be some atrocious mistake. I sent it to seven of my peers, but it could still somehow have some totally inappropriate career-ending aspect to it that nobody saw. Everybody uses email as a self-promotion tool now and it's totally valid but I have been getting spam for over a decade and I know how annoying it is.

And now, five minutes after the heart-stopping eternity of watching the "processing" message proceed, my body remains light but my heartbeat has returned to normal, and I just had a fit of relieved laughing.

Wait! There's a reply! Already! It must be a portofolio call-in, or some kind of positive feedback, or a scathing flame...oh, no, it's just an out-of-office message.

Sitting on the other side of it now, I realize that, whenever some promotional email is annoying me, that I never give any thought to the sender. I realize now that, in my head, they just click a button and send 3048693748612374632 emails, then go back to watching TV. My experience is nothing like that, so maybe theirs isn't either.

Sympathy for the devil.