e-mail bankruptcy
n.— «Dr. Turkle said that in her research on people’s relationship with computation, she hears more and more about a fantasy she calls “e-mail bankruptcy,” a fantasy that she sometimes shares. “In my case,” she said, “when I feel that “doing my e-mail’ is taking me away from the people and the work that I care about, I might declare bankruptcy.” The senders of the thousand or so pieces of e-mail in her In basket would receive an automatic message saying something like: “Thank you for your message. Unfortunately, my unread mail has become too numerous for me to process and much of it may by now be out of date. I will not be replying to any of my current messages. If you still need to contact me, please send a new message.”» —“In Lost E-Mail, a Dividend” by Constance Rosenblum New York Times Feb. 14, 2002. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Amid court-ordered busing in the 1970s, a middle-school teacher tried to distract her nervous students on the first day of class with this strange assignment: find a monarch caterpillar. The result? A memorable lesson in the miracle of metamorphosis...
In 1971, when a new public library opened in Troy, Michigan, famous authors and artists were invited to write letters to the city’s youngest readers, extolling the many benefits of libraries. One of the loveliest was from E.B. White, author of...