I never thought that I’d be the type of person who obsessively checks their email, but that notification icon is hard to resist. And besides, if I don’t my inbox gets into the triple digits and that’s just depressing. You know you’ve had an unproductive week when you couldn’t even get around to clicking “mark as read” a few times; not even reading a single email.

So, in the spirit of adventure, curiosity, and a little bit of between classes boredom, I have decided to read some emails from ages past and reevaluate the “mark as read” status I relegated them to.

Contestant #1: This is an email that I received first semester of freshman year. It is entitled “Valley of Death” referring to the pair of large stairways that one needs to mount to reach my freshman year dorm, Brecon. It was a memo from my dorm presidents, notifying me that there would be chalk for people to draw all over the Valley of Death with. I remember seeing this happening – there were people drawing hearts, smiley faces (and the odd Dr. Who reference) on my way back from class one day. Something that I didn’t know because I had never read the email: all of those people had fudge! FUDGE! I missed out on free fudge! Status: Should Have Read

Contestant #2: This is a newsletter I signed up for through some internship website. I received this particular edition second semester of my freshman year. It is titled “Surviving the World’s Worst Internship”. It contains summaries of two articles and the links to the full articles. Other than that, there are a lot of broken links and about 6 inches of blank space until the footer. No free food was missed. Status: Mark As Read

Contestant #3: This is an email I received this summer shortly before I left for preseason for cross country. It basically states that the walkways to the gym would be under construction for the better part of preseason (construction was delayed; the walkways are only fully functional as of this week, but at least they’re pretty) in order to fix drainage problems. Now this would have been good to know on the first day of preseason when I was late to practice, only to find that I had to go the long way around and was even more late. It was not a good start.  Status: Should Have Read

So now I read emails as soon as I get them. I’m still late (that’s what Bryn Mawr time is for!) but I never miss free food.