No Contact Achieved! No Email, No Phone Call Can Penetrate This Barrier

All forms of communication effectively rendered useless.

Doctor, doctor. . .Is there anybody out there?

I sit here typing this today 25 minutes after my scheduled tele-health appointment with my doctor to review my test results. I received 7 email reminders of the appointment in addition to two robocalls confirming the appointment. One additional phone call from an actual person yesterday confirmed for me that the doctor would call me at the time of my appointment. It would be nice if he remembered as well.

{Update 3/27/21: He called 2 1/2 hours later.}

I am currently seeing two doctors for various health issues. The second doctor’s office also sent a reminder a day to my email every day for the past 7 days. That ‘s 14 email reminders for 2 doctor’s appointments.

I missed an email from my study group regarding a zoom meeting yesterday because I receive over 100 emails a day. That’s just into the main folder in one email account. If I had all the time in the world, I could look at the social and promotions tabs bringing my daily intake to approximately 300 emails. If I were truly masochistic, I could dive into my spam folder which receives 1 email every 3 minutes. That’s 20 spam emails every hour, or 480 spam emails a day.

“If you don’t receive an email shortly, be sure to check your spam folder.” Yeah, right. Thanks for the advice.

That is just for one email account. Like most people, I have a work email in addition to my personal email. In the first 2 months on the job, I received a total of 500 emails. That’s 250 per month, or an additional 8 1/3 emails per day. I also have several other email accounts that I use for websites that insist I give them an email address in order to not get immediately shut out, unable to access whatever it is I need from them. I have over 600 online accounts.

This is my official “I give up” post.

You win. Society in its inconsiderate shortsightedness and psychotic neurosis had made email a useless tool for me. If you need to get ahold of me for any reason, I don’t know what to say. Using my phone as a phone was rendered impossible before the email pile up. When I was receiving 5 telemarketer calls per day from 8am to 12pm, I changed my phone number, changed my service provider, put myself on the national “do not call list” and downloaded 2 spam call blockers.

If you try to call me and you’re not already on my list of contacts, your call has about a 90% chance to be blocked as spam or of being sent directly to my voicemail. My phone number is about as useless as my email for trying to contact me.

You, my friend, might not be able to get through, but don’t worry. The spammers are hacking away at my wall. A couple have broken through. I’ve received 4 text messages from a number I explicitly blocked and a robocall from “my car’s manufacturer” while waiting with my guard down for the doctor to call.

It’s not like I don’t want to talk to you. In fact, I’m quite lonely. But the way the world is today, unless you come knocking on my front door (how’d you get past the security guard?), I honestly don’t know how to contact myself.

This is insane. I couldn’t be the first person to have run into this problem. I don’t see it talked about in my filtered bubble of pre-screened YouTube news, so I don’t think the nation sees it as a pressing issue.

I always wondered when we would achieve first contact with an alien civilization, but it looks as though we’ve achieved “no contact” with our own civilization first.

Do not bother replying to this email, there’s no one on the other side.