Email Response Times

A few days ago, a friend of mine sent an email to a guy that she was dating. She sent the email at 10:14am, and by 10:45am she was starting to freak out. Why had he not responded? Was he in a meeting? Was he not interested anymore? Where was he? Was he dating someone else? Did he see her Spanx? WHAT THE HELL WAS GOING ON HERE? This friend obviously called me so that I would calm her down, perform my world renowned Occam's Razor analysis on the situation and assure her that the simplest possible explanation here was that he was busy at work and would get back to her later. Unfortunately, I don't actually believe that crap because everybody is on their computers refreshing their browsers 24/7, and if they're not in front of their computers, they have blackberries, cellphones, text messages, fax machines, pagers, scanners, beepers and Facebook updates, and if someone doesn't respond to an email within 10 minutes of your sending it, it basically means that they are playing a game and ignoring you in order to look cool. If my friend sent an email at 10:14am, the guy obviously read it at 10:15, and there is no reason on god's green earth for him to wait 4 hours to respond because the jig is up and everyone checks their email every minute and no one believes the "hey, just saw this" or "busy day at work" lines because everyone is bored and no one is busy at work. Unless a tornado ripped through your office, I'm sorry but you're sitting at your computer and you got the frigging email so just respond so people can stop having goddamn heart attacks.

Another friend of mine got an email from a girl 3 weeks after he had sent an email to her, and in it she said "Hey - sorry for the delay. I am spending the day today going through old emails that have piled up" because apparently the girl expected my friend to be living in Narnia and believe that she had been so busy she hadn't even remembered that she EVEN HAD email accounts to check, and by the time she had remembered her gmail account, so many emails had accumulated that she had to cancel all her appointments, order in food and explain to her friends who called "sorry, can't do anything today - reviewing old emails." Frankly, these lies are just insulting and if people could just respond in a timely fashion instead of conjuring up ludicrous stories of meetings and busyness that would be great thanks.