Perhaps this has happened to you. When you reach a certain number of decades, it’s sometimes a challenge to keep everything in mind. I confess to being impressed by young brains. I admire the confidence of youth because truth does seem to depend on when it’s discovered. In any case, I don’t always recollect where I’ve put things. Online this can be a real problem—I have so many bookmarks that I could open my own bookstore. The place that it really bothers me, though, is email. Perhaps somewhat foolishly, I use email as my reminder. I file or delete emails when I have time to do so, but the volume is often difficult to keep up with. Most of it isn’t personal, of course. People don’t wonder how you’re doing with all this email, probably because they’re trying to keep on top of their own.
In any case, many organizations like to send out reminders that your membership is about to expire many weeks in advance of it actually happening. I’m not exactly flush with cash and I like to renew the week before expiration. If I had a pile of gold I’d be glad to pay a month to six-weeks in advance, but I live in the real world. So I let the reminder sit in my email pile, figuring, naively, that I’ll see it in time. Well, I wouldn’t be writing this post if I actually did. No, other emails keep on coming, forcing my reminders off the top page and into internet purgatory. It takes at least a holiday weekend to have enough time to file all my accumulated emails and then I find them, cowering, shivering and cold, under the weight of tons of other, less urgent emails.
Some have suggested that I put them on my Calendar app. The thing is, I forget to look at it. Or I could “set a reminder”—that’s not a bad idea, if the email doesn’t arrive with a bunch of others so that I don’t forget about it before it gets bumped too far down. You see, different people think in different ways. We’re only really starting to recognize that. Some of us function better when the reminder is sent closer to the deadline. It’s not like you need the time to take out a loan or anything before making what still feels, to me, like a big-ticket item. The regular bills, they keep on a-comin’ and they can’t be ignored. To people of a certain number of decades, it’d be helpful to remind us a bit closer to the deadline. It’s not like you even have to wait for the payment to arrive through something that used to be called the mail.
