Is it me? Do I offend?

Certain events of the last several weeks are forcing me to reevaluate my opinion of myself as a coherent writer and literate communicator. I either don’t make sense or inadvertently offend people to such an extent that they don’t click “reply”, I’m not sure which.

Four times over the last few weeks, I’ve been in the midst of e-mail “conversations” when all the other parties simply stop writing. I wouldn’t think much of it if it were only one person (“Well, Frank is busy this time of year” or “Susie’s on the other coast, she’ll probably write tomorrow”) but on these four separate occasions, everyone with whom I was corresponding, both in business and personal communication, goes silent at once. Was it something I said? –er, wrote? It’s not my e-mail provider, because there are at least three separate servers involved and all the while, I continue to receive many valuable offers to increase my penis size and obtain cheap prescription drugs.

Why does everyone conspire to ignore me at the same time? I don’t know what I should do - I feel silly writing an e-mail reading “Did you get my e-mail?” - which I actually forced myself to do on a couple that were business-related because I needed to continue with the project. Of course, neither person answered my “Did you get my e-mail?” e-mail. I wasn’t surprised.

Next, during the interim phases in which people DO answer my e-mail, they seem not to have read or comprehended it in the slightest, again true for both business and personal matters. A couple of many examples: The Boss assigned me a project: evaluate our options for developing a certain parcel of land. I verified the zoning, figured out several possibilities, researched the costs and projected income streams for the different options, including nifty accounting artifacts like ROI. I sent him a detailed e-mail outlining the various options and my recommendations. He wrote back, “Go ahead and file suit.” File suit? Against whom? For what, exactly? Another time, I sent out the monthly financials and a co-worker responded, “What about [name of entity who hasn’t done business with us in 5 or 6 years]?” Er - well, what about them? I pondered this and e-mailed back “What about them?” and - you see this coming, right? - no reply.

I have concluded that I am either (a) existing in a weird space-time anomaly not dissimilar to “dog years” wherein I live only one day to everyone else’s 3 days, and the seeming communication gaps are explained by events occurring on the days to which I am not privy; or (b) I am suffering from an undiagnosed psychosis and missing/mystery responses would be perfectly clear were I aware of the experiences of my other two personalities, Annabelle and KiKi. Because I have given this some consideration and I think that if I were to have fragments of my personality splinter off into entities separate and distinct from Helly, they would be the kind of chicks called Annabelle and KiKi. To test this hypothesis, I have established an e-mail address for the alternate personalities so if you no longer have any interest in writing to me, drop one of them a line, will you eh?