From the Desk of ‘Is this Technology Really Necessary …’
Google has added a new application to its Gmail email service to stop drunk people from sending emails they will regret later when they are sober and hung over.
Yes, we now have Mail Goggles. You know, for those times when you come home hammered at 2 a.m. and decide it’s a good time to tell your firm’s CEO that his strategy to save the company sucks and that you’ve been sleeping with his wife. Both facts are patently incorrect, dreamt up by a fuzzy brain. But, hey, after 10 beers intermixed with six shots of Jack Daniels, it sure sounded true in your mind.
Mail Goggles forces the inebriated emailer to answer a series of five supposedly simple math problems before it
will send out an email, thus saving the sender from embarrassing him/herself, ruining relationships or declaring his eternal love, again, to an old flame who dumped him eight years earlier, but whose email address he recently found on Facebook.
The service is preset to activate late at night on weekends, but if this does not work drunks can simply set the program to turn on during periods they are likely to be bombed, say midnight on Fridays or 2 p.m. on Monday. When all is ready, grab that bottle of vodka and drink up!
But wait.
There are holes in the system. What if you get whacked outside your normal drunk hours? What if you are really good at math no matter how many Appletinis you consume or if your PC’s keyboard has that nice little icon that brings up your always stone-cold-sober calculator? What happens if in a drunken haze you bring up Yahoo! mail or Outlook? And, of course, it does nothing for the person who decides to text or (heaven forbid) drunkenly call his ex on the phone. Because we all know that never has happened before.
My other thought is what happens if you are, for some reason, not drinking during your appointed drunk time and need to send and emergency email and are not the most skilled mathematician? Such implications were obviously not taken under consideration by Google’s developers.
Maybe they were drunk at the time.
