h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The speed of any e-mail system is inversely proportionate to the urgency by which you need to communicate with someone or have them communicate with you. If anything is ever really life-threateningly important then you might as well forget it and revert to snail mail as I can gurantee that any email system involved will collapse!

You can also guarantee, as with phone calls, that the email you have been waiting for will arrive just after you have logged off the internet. And you are then too busy to log on again for the next 24 hours.

If that's the longest you've ever waited for an email, you've seen nothing yet...

Absolutely. Try getting a reply from Westwood as to why Tiberian Sun won't work.

Hotmail is particularly stunning and once processed an email sent to me 2 months previously which I answered in some puzzlement as I recognized it as one I had previously received. It seems this happens quite often but then what do you expect from Microsoft etc etc etc!

I think the major law of emails is "Never push the send button when you are angry!"

It's all too easy to write something nasty, sarchastic or otherwise unpleasant when someone has upset you. You usually hit the send button and immeadiately regret how obnoxious you've been, but, it's too late, the damage is done.

On the other hand, if you've got a good friend who doesn't mind you spouting off about something that's got up your nose, it can be quite a good way to releave tension.

Maybe this belongs in stupid users, but why is it - when you've pressed 'send' and nothing happens, you become convinced that pressing 'send' several more times - sometimes holding the button down for longer, will make the email go quicker?

I dunno. Probably the same thing that convinces people that if they press the elevator call button many times in rapid succession, the elevator will get to you faster.

This simply reflects the absence of suitable JavaScript codes written into browsers: if they all had H2G2's "Please don't press the submit-button again" come up after one press, they'd probably get the message...

Fruitbat

Why is it also that when you press the'wait' button at a set of traffic lights the next person to arrive will also press the button and so on until it eventually turns green? I think it is peoples lack of trust in each other.Do they all think that the first person hasn't pressed the button properly or what?

That has always worried me - not that people at traffic lights are stupid, we know that, but what if pressing the button restarts the program that waits for a suitable delay in the traffic before turning the lights red? You could be there for hours as the button is pressed every few seconds by new arrivals. Famine, plague, pestilence - I'll never cross a road again!

'There, there, time for your pills........'

While we're talking about traffic lights....

Why do some people apparently refuse to cross the road when there's no vehicle within a few miles merely because the wee green man isn't flashing?

Maybe they just like to see the wee green man flashing.I know I would!!!

How about; you press the button, and wait and then fianlly the road is clear, so you cross and when you reach the other side, the beeper goes to say that you can cross, the little green man appears and three cars are stationary, waiting for the light to go green for them, glaring at you becuase there's no-one on the crossing becuase you've already crossed.

or..
someone has just done all that, and you arrive and the man goes red just as you get there and all the cars start up and then you have to wait ages...press the button, cross, then it beeps ...

(circle/cyclic)