by Tom Purcell on April 22, 2024

Boy, is technology making is ruder. It all started with email.

You see, long before the era of nasty Facebook posts and mean tweets -- long before people had such an easy means to be rude to each other -- there was a much tamer version of email rudeness.

Let me share an email incident I experienced firsthand in 1999.

Having just moved to Washington, D.C., I joined a large writer's organization, hoping to meet other writers -- or, to be more precise, WOMEN writers.

I got permission from the writer's organization to send a happy-hour invitation to all of its members on its email broadcast list or "listserv." This was how groups of people communicated electronically before websites and social media were common.

About 40 writers attended the first happy-hour gathering -- one that would turn out to be the last.

As it went, one........

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