Seinfeldian thought

After yet another coma inducing carbohydrate laden dinner, plopped senselessly in my favorite imitation position of a water buffalo, I was watching a rerun of Seinfeld. Fans of Seinfeld may recognise this episode- its the one where people close to him compete for a speed dial position in his phone. Hilarious and it made me think is there something vaguely similar we do in real life and it turns out perhaps....

Email... many claim its the next best thing to sliced bread. Some claim bread supercedes it, a detail that I prefer to think of as nitpicking. I don't need to be evangelical about the merits of email. As a matter of fact its so pervasive that people had to invent a word called snail mail to refer to the traditional paper route.

It has a catch though- an important often missed detail. When you are mailing your friends, what sequence should you follow for their names? This single orderly (or not) decision has left behind more bad feelings than even bad breath. The uninitiated may just choose from their address books- this was good while it lasted, because it implied alphabetical order and people with names starting in 'V' where resigned to the fact of having their names show up in the end of a scrolled list. Then came gmail with name completion- thrilled with this new feature the novice started typing out names from memory and effectively jumbled the well thought out alphabetical design. Friends were spurned- anger and confusion resulted. My name is Akash- how could my name come up in the middle of the list? Am I not his closest friend? We were buddies from high school and yet Vikas comes before me in the list? Akash would write indignantly back to Bharath with his name near the end of the list. Bharath gets upset- Did I do this on purpose? no! I was so enthused by gmail- thats an innocent mistake... Broken friendship glasses everywhere. Email the knight in shining armor promiser of connecting friends around the globe fails.

The careful emailer realizes there is no easy solution to this ungodly mess. He jumbles up the name list- making sure he remembers who comes first and who goes last. Next mail he reverses them- everybody gets a fair chance to head the list. Cycling of job roles. He is proud in the knowledge that justice was handed out with an iron hand.

Mr. Justice finishes up his recent blog, posts it and opens with anticipation his next mail from his close buddy and is dismayed to see his name near the end of the list......