To send, perchance to receive (National Post, July 28)

I started using e-mail about 12 years ago -- tentatively at first, and only to communicate with a close friend who'd moved overseas. But within a year, I got hooked on what I now consider to be man's supreme accomplishment in communications technology. I check my inbox countless times each day, always with eagerness and a positive sense of anticipation. In my brave new world, e-mail became the new "talking" -- and I came to view the phone more or less as e-mail's emergency back-up.

But last Thursday, a mysterious breakdown rocked that world. I could "Send" but not "Receive."

The time passed ominously: four, eight, 12 hours, and nothing in my inbox. Impossible. I kept jabbing at the mail icon like a programmed lab rat on his pellet-releasing lever, but no, not even the random reinforcement of a stray penile enlargement ad.

My mature inner Tom Hanks thought: "Videotron, we have a problem." But my infantile inner Gollum hissed: Where is its precioussss? Where is its e-mailssss?

When the postal workers go on strike, everyone knows. If the telephone's dead, you get a busy signal. When my server collapses entirely, it neither sends nor receives, so my contact's mail gets bounced back instantly. But this time my server was fine. This time my e-interlocutors thought I was there. They were waiting for the reply I could not give.

Hardly a great trial in the grand scheme, I realize -- and certainly not one that would have bothered me back in the early 1990s, when e-mail was a novelty. Now it is so embedded in my identity, life is unthinkable without it. I am never "off the wagon" any more. Is this dangerous? How can I know? Unlike alcohol and tobacco, e-mail is too young to study as an intoxicant. So far there is no Surgeon-General's report to guide me.

All I know is that my inexplicable deprivation and that empty inbox caused embarrassingly extreme anxiety. O Videotron, I thought, why hast thou forsaken username vlxgtciu, password *******?

You would think someone so emotionally invested in e-mail would know a few things about how it works. But no, I am a hapless techno-peasant. I made ineffectual efforts to solve the problem. I shut down the computer, unplugged the modem, plugged it back in, booted up, stabbed at the so-scary "Tools" and "Properties" and "Options," clicking random check marks into dialogue boxes, then clicking them off. But I might as well have been a chimpanzee peering at the control panel of a 747; I didn't have a bloody clue. And still I saw the dreaded Message of Doom: "Mail Delivery Complete."

As I waited for tech support, I wondered why some people seem to chug along, apparently happy, without e-mail in their life. They say they prefer the telephone. How can they? Certainly for intimate conversations or emergencies, nothing beats "real-time communication." But otherwise, e-mail is so liberating. On the telephone you are in performance mode, forced by the rules of communications etiquette to comply with the cues, tangents and time-wasting conversational whims of your caller. In e-mails you are autonomous, mentally and temporally unconstrained, yet completely engaged with your recipient.

In the end, my problem was solved by a clever techie who discovered that a Spam Blocker program I'd tried to disable was warehousing my incoming correspondence, rather like a divorced spouse with the house key sneaking in to steal the mail every day. I changed my "lock" -- that is, my password -- and the program was foiled.

Suddenly I heard a beloved "Ping!" ("New mail has arrived. Do you want to read it now?"). The sun emerged from black clouds, birds began to sing, children ran laughing across a meadow, and Ping! Went the Strings of My Heart! Addicted? Yes. Happily it's a continuously renewable fix that's cheap, legal and non-fattening.

When it works, that is. When it doesn't, I am like one of those cracking-voiced, big-haired, leather-befringed country singers belting out the Internet blues you suffer from electronic betrayal:

Yew break mah hort whan you d'ceive

Yew mash mah true love threw a sieve

Yew trap me in that Web yew weave,

Wha' cain Ah Saind but nawt R'ceive...?

© National Post 2004