A few weeks ago I wrote a column on naming things. I led off with my irritation that many people call postal mail "snail mail". I gave a few examples and scenarios where email is lost more often than postal mail.
Yesterday I had a weird example of getting a reply to an email before I received the original.
Harry Welty, candidate for the 8th Congressional District in Minnesota, sent his campaign manager and me a message at 11:11 a.m. The campaign manager, Chris, responded at 11:39. I checked my email after 2:00 p.m. and received Chris' reply but not Harry's original. I sent a message to Harry at 2:14 about it. Chris responded to my message at 2:20.
Harry sent another message at 3:06 which I got at 3:04. Harry's computer clock is fast. I responded at 3:11.
I checked my email at 6:48 and still had not received the first email of the day from Harry. I checked again shortly before 10 in the evening and found the snail email in my inbox. I sent a reply at 9:56 and Harry replied to my reply at 10:21; I had already gone to bed and didn't see that until the next morning.
I suspect that the first email got caught in a stack of emails because of heavy traffic. Other messages were put on top of it, and so it didn't pop out of the stack until much later in the day.
