Falling to the Temptation of an E-Cleaning Loophole
It’s a ritual. A relationship ends badly or before it really began and I clean house … electronically, that is. All messages “to” and “from” get blown out of Match.com or Myspace. My Yahoo e-mail also gets cleansed. The occasional message that strayed into my work e-mail … I search and destroy those too. Then there’s Google Chat and Yahoo Messenger. Not only do I delete the chat archives, but I also erase the contact … I figure I can always re-add them if necessary, and this saves me from spying to see if they are online … and (who am I kidding?) from the Internet’s equivalent of drunk dialing – inebriated IMing.
In the past year, I’ve wiped the slate clean a few times and never looked back … until a few weeks ago. For some reason … at this point I seriously can’t remember why … I was in my Yahoo e-mail contacts, and was shocked to find five Yahoo Messenger contacts that I’d deleted.
F‘em, I thought, and deleted them for good. Except … the next day I got to thinking (never a good thing), was that a yellow smiley face next to one of them? Did that mean he was online? Didn’t he only start using Yahoo Messenger because of me? Does he maybe want to talk to me? Which I’m sure leads you to ask, “Why is Amber such a dumb girl?”
Well, it didn’t matter that I’d deleted his information … I hadn’t forgotten and added him right back in. Which I’m sure leads you to ask, “Why is Amber such a colossally dumb girl?”
I had drafted this post way back then, but hadn’t wanted to post it with its original ending … which was that I had been unable to delete him. However, after a few days of spying … and thankfully no inebriated IMing, I deleted him for good. Now that I haven’t peeked again in a few weeks, I know I’ve safely moved on for good and figured it was fine to post this without the danger of having to eat crow.