3 months ago
16
Q: I used to have a work colleague who was one of the most boring men in all of Sydney. Recently, I received an email from him proposing that we meet for dinner when he comes to Melbourne on holiday. I can think of nothing worse. How do I decline the invitation?
S.M., Fitzroy, VIC
Credit: Illustration by Simon Letch
A: You don’t need to. Just don’t reply to his email. Don’t reply to any of his emails. And if, by chance, you bump into him sometime in the future and he asks you why you never replied, say something like: “Email? I never got your email. Weird, I check my inbox hourly, never saw an email from you. Regularly check my spam folder, too. When was this? Oh! Wait a sec: I do remember having some email issues … yeah, I wasn’t able to receive emails, so I got on a tech help-line and they kept me waiting for an hour, maybe an hour 15 minutes, and some guy finally came on – was it Harvey? Hugo? Something with an H. Harvey or Hugo. Anyway, he told me to rebuild my inbox and I asked if I should get a hammer and nails and laughed and laughed and he put me on hold for another hour. Sorry, this is going on; I’ll wind it up. Yeah, so it turns out my mail protocols weren’t syncing, which was affecting my TCP/IP connections, and I simply needed to swap from port 143 for unencrypted communication to port 993 for secure, SSL/TLS encrypted communications and that’s probably why I never got your email. Such a shame!” And he’ll probably nod and smile and say, “Oh, well. That’s OK. It was good to see you again. Have to get going.” Then he’ll hurry off and never contact you again, for you are surely one of the most boring people in all of Melbourne.
