avi@pegasus.UUCP (11/09/83)
This is a follow-up to a discussion between Karl and Tim maroney on whether mail is reaching unc. Some of us believe in the infallibility of various messaging systems -- such as the U.S. snail and the phone system. We are often rudely jarred when we go somewhere else where things like five minutes before a dial tone and envelopes that are steamed open before you get them are taken for granted. I am amused at the way we take network mail as an inalienable right. There are no end-to-end guarantees, and paths are often not reversible. At least two people have let me know that I never received their submissions to my poll. Publishing the names of the people who responded did help. I wonder if anyone else was not included for the same reason. I sent reply mail to everyone, but I wonder if some of you did not get it. Please let me know. As Karl said, this is not the forum for complaining about this issue. However, net.religion has been useful in getting mail to me. I sent several letters to Valerie Polichar (aka lady Arwen) and assumed she hadn't gotten them after several months of waiting. Finally, she submitted a reply to one of my articles on net.religion that worked. It turned out that she had been trying for months. What (if anything) does this have to do with religion? I believe that it is important to keep trying and to have faith that someday an article will arrive along a path that works. If you really want to send mail to someone, just reply to every article they post. :-) Alternatively, you can use the rational approach of abandoning blind faith and making a direct electronic connection. I can now freely converse with Laura Creighton and Dave Sherman because pegasus now polls utcsstat regularly. If Karl REALLY wants to talk to unc, he can arrange a connection. Yes, I know that many of you are not free to generate huge phone bills. Neither will we once we really swing into the business world -- but that is yet another religious issue I don't want to get into. I vote for moving this discussion to net.male. -- -=> Avi E. Gross @ AT&T Information Systems Laboratories (201) 576-6241 suggested paths: [ihnp4, allegra, cbosg, utcsstat, hogpc, ...]!pegasus!avi