The Thing About "Read Receipts"

Email read-receipts are handy things when you use them at the office. It can verify for you whether an important or time-sensitive message has been read by your recipient. This is a great office feature purely designed to "cover your ass" in modern-day business dealings. Using them in social situations is however, borderline obsessive.

Dear reader, it may be hard for you to fathom, but yes, the fabulous and ever charming Reese is a single woman. I know! You can pick your jaw from off the floor now.

So, as of late, I've been hitting the singles scene and meeting lots of new people. Phone numbers or emails get exchanged as well as promises for re-connecting. Because I'm a modern girl, I've had opportunity to be the one to initiate contact after the first meeting. Let me tell you, it's been disastrous! I think that the men boys in question were too freaked out by the concept. I would send out an email and invariably get a short reply or none at all.

In the case where I don't get any reply, it has been suggested by my dear, kindly friends that maybe I sent the email to the wrong person, or maybe he's on vacation, or maybe he checks his email once a month, or maybe, JUST MAYBE, he's trapped under something immovable and heavy which prevents him from replying, no matter how valiantly he tries. These same friends also suggest the use of email read-receipts in future situations so as to avoid that unnecessary angst. Do you buy that? I don't. Geez, drunken dialing is bad enough.

Lesson learned: put the rejections (including the indirect ones) aside and move on. And please, please don't use read receipts. It only makes you look more obsessive... and my friends can tell you... I really don't need to add that to my repertoire.

Remember: friends don't let friends use read receipts.