Sending and receiving email is something that lots of people do every day. In this episode, Andrew and Suzanne talk all about email. Join them as they chat about their first email addresses, how emailing has changed over the years, and their email habits. Plus, Suzanne reveals a hilarious problem she has with her inbox!

Expressions included in the Learning Materials:

* The socials

* To be dying to know something

* To lose your cool

* AOL

* Dial-up

* Post

* A mascot

* Tartan

* A stab in the dark

* A chain email

* Spam

* To trail off

Sample transcript

Suzanne: So, how are you today, Andrew?

Andrew: I’m pretty good, I’m pretty good. I’m excited to record this episode because we’re going to be talking about emailing.

Suzanne: Oh.

Andrew: Yeah, and the reason that I was inspired to talk about emailing today is because I have a really funny email story that happened to me recently.

Suzanne: OK, so you have to tell me because I am anxiously awaiting the story.

Andrew: You’re dying to know?

Suzanne: Yes.

Andrew: Well, maybe I should say it’s kind of interesting, it’s not super interesting. But have you ever signed up for an email list?

Suzanne: Yes, I have.

Andrew: So, you know, we know each other from going to university. And when I was in university I was a very good student and I signed up for mailing lists of some journals so that if new research came out, I would get an email and I would know right away what’s going on.

Suzanne: OK, like a notification?

Andrew: Exactly, a notification. So I’m on this mailing list for a journal called The Heritage Language Journal.

Suzanne: OK.

Andrew: And they send out a quarterly newsletter just updating their readers on what’s going on with them. And one person decided that they didn’t want to be on the mailing list anymore and so they replied to that newsletter. And usually this would just go back to the webmaster. It wouldn’t go to everybody. So this person, they would reply to the email and it would go back to whoever sent the email, and the people that are on the list wouldn’t see it.

Suzanne: Right. Andrew: Right, that’s how they work. But something went wrong and everybody got this message of this one reader saying, “I don’t want to be on this list.” And so this just sparked an avalanche of emails of people responding, saying, “Oh, you know what? I also don’t want to be on this list,” “I don’t want to be on this list,” “I don’t want to be on this list.” And it was just email after email after email coming to everybody on the list, and it was so distracting. I couldn’t get any work done this day because every 2 seconds my phone would buzz and the message would pop up on my computer. And it was hilarious.

Then, as time went on, you had people saying, “Don’t reply to any more emails because everybody is getting the email,” and this started another conversation. I must have gotten about 200 emails that day.

Suzanne: Oh, my goodness. Wow.

Andrew: Yeah, it was crazy. And the funny thing was, it was all academics that are on the list. They’re doctors and librarians and professors, and they are people that work on their computer all day too, so they were being distracted by all these emails. And they were starting to get pretty angry by the end of the day, after they were getting all these emails. So it was hilarious to notice the shift in tone.

Suzanne: Yeah.

Andrew: From the start, people are very polite, and at the end of the day they’re really angry in their emails. But I thought it was hilarious to think of angry librarians and professors.

Audio/Learning Materials: