Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Passive-Agressive Games

Our homegrown server is recognized by AOL (and a few other places) as a potential source of spam, so none of our e-mail addresses can be used to send mail to AOL users. Unfortunately one of my main yarn suppliers has an AOL address, as do my grandfather and other important correspondents. So we have a work-around solution whereby we send e-mail through a different account (that AOL somehow does not think could be a source of spam). If I forget to send the e-mail through the other account, though, I get messages saying the mail is undeliverable. Evidently my husband also gets these same messages from my e-mail mistakes, since he has recently spent a good deal of time complaining about them whenever I make a mistake sending my e-mails.

I usually try not to play passive-aggressive games with Favorite Husband. But he's been complaining to me lately because of a problem I have no control over, and I have to do something. So now whenever I send a message the wrong way and get an "undeliverable mail" response, I am e-mailing him with a profuse apology. It's probably not the best response, but it sure beats getting chided even after I've explained to him that I do sometimes make mistakes and the error messages are not hurting him in any way.