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Great Life: How do it know?

Posted: March 3, 2013 - 12:22am

There’s a lot — a WHOLE LOT — I don’t understand about this electronic age in which we live.

Some things impress me.

Other things mystify me.

I’m impressed that my cellphone knows when it’s going to run out of juice, so to speak.

In the middle of the night, should I awaken, I’ll hear a pitiful little “beep squeak, beep squeak.”

The first time, I had no idea from where the pitiful little sound was emitting.

Now I know, so, should I hear “beep squeak, beep squeak” I’ll leap from my bed and immediately give my cellphone the life-giving connection it requires to stay alive.

The latest mystery involves the computer and email.

I mentioned it to the guy who smells good, and he has a perfectly logical explanation, which, naturally, I perfectly do not understand.

Several weeks ago, I received the following email: “This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification. Delivery to the following recipients is still under way after 25.7 hour(s):

“ * anne.heymen@staugustine.com

“Will keep trying and contact you if the message can’t be delivered permanently.”

My question: If the email knows how to send to me at the correct address the fact that an email addressed incorrectly cannot be sent, why not cut out the middle man and just send me the email that was addressed incorrectly?

“Because,” said The Guy Who Smells Good, “it was a human error.”

“But it knew enough to send me a notification to the correct address that the email address was incorrect,” I replied.

“You don’t understand,” he replied. “It was a human error.”

“No, I don’t,” I responded, and once again raised the question: “If the computer can send a message to the correct address that it can’t send a message with the incorrect address, what’s up with that?”

We went round and round, and finally gave up.

But the whole thing reminded me of a joke I heard years ago about a Thermos: “It keeps hot things hot and cold things cold. How do it know?”

And that, Guy Who Smells Good, is my big question: “How do it know?”



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