My Technological Job Moment

This has just not been my week, technologically speaking. I would never compare my life to Job in the ‘real world;’ this past week, a five-year-old girl was killed in Raleigh, after being prostituted by her mother for an undetermined time – unbeknownst to her father. The economy is allegedly recovering while an analogous recovery in employment is apparently not necesarry. Chronic hunger – euphemistically deemed ‘food insecurity’ by those fluent in policyspeak, is on the rise. And that’s just in America – to say nothing of Palestine, or Darfur.

So no, if I were attempting to compare myself to Job in The World Outside, I’d be tragically unaware. But in cyberspace, at the intersection of Big Corporate Business and Big Tech, I feel like I’ve had a steady stream of little nanobot robot servants coming to me, rattling off some techno-calamity, breathlessly finishing “…and I alone have lived to tell you!” Allow me my lament:

Gmail Introduces ‘Custom Time’

Really and truly.

Pre-date your messages
You tell us what time you would have wanted your email sent, and we’ll take care of the rest. Need an email to arrive 6 hours ago? No problem.

Mark as read or unread
Take sending emails to the past one step further. We let you make emails look like they’ve been read all along.

Make them count
Use your custom time stamped messages wisely — each Gmail user gets ten per year.

Worry less
Forget your finance reports. Forget your anniversary. We’ll make it look like you remembered.

Check it out.

No, of course it isn’t Google’s April Fool’s Day joke. Sigh. I liked Gmail Paper better.