Technology Fail (and a Bonus Modern Dating Fail Parable at the End)

(If the top part gets boring, scroll down to the parable.)

Background: I have four Gmail accounts: my real one with my real name; one for this site; one for dating with a terribly clever handle; and a pseudonymous one that I use to submit pieces for publication. Why pseudonymous, you ask? Well, I’ve always wanted a nom de plume, for one thing, and also I’m wrestling with my online anonymity. There’s simply no way I can allow this site to be linked to my real name through Google. I can’t have potential employers and dates seeing this site before they see me. I also don’t really have clips to submit, save really boring, wonky work stuff and a few old food articles published in a short-lived DC glossy. This site is it, for now, and so, a pseudonym.

Call me Ciara Flynn. A friend told me this weekend it sounds like the name of the heroine in a bodice ripper set in ye olde Ireland. I am totally down with that.

Anyway, I have all four accounts set up through my main, real-name account. I can email directly from one account as any one of the four alter egos listed above, and all mail TO those accounts is forwarded to me. Are you with me so far?

OK. So, I’ve been submitting articles and making pitches as Ciara Flynn since March 2011. It’s been a little discouraging, as no one ever writes back. I knew some of the places I’d queried–like McSweeneys–were very, very long shots, but still–no responses, ever, from anyone, was discouraging–and, frankly, a bit rude. Responding to personal emails is just common professional courtesy, right? (Foreshadowing!)

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to get a piece published somewhere new. To start getting my name out there, with an eye on getting a real writing job someday, or at least meeting other writerly people. (Fine. I want to write a book and get it published. Who doesn’t?) So, last Friday at lunch I decided to polish something up and send it out into the ether. Carpe diem, Ciara! I said to myself. (I won’t tell me my real name because I don’t know if I can trust me yet.)

Despite the foolproof inbox system described above, I decided that I would show the Flying Spaghetti Monster how serious I am about pursuing writing, and logged into Ciara’s account.

…which apparently I haven’t done for 10 months.

…and which apparently isn’t automatically forwarding messages to me, as I believed it was.

I figured these two things out when I saw all the nice replies I’ve been getting from publications to which I have submitted pieces. SINCE MARCH. We’d love to publish this! Send us a bio, they said. This isn’t quite right for us, but I like it, especially this part, and hope you submit again.  (That one was from Salon.com.)  Great idea! Send us a draft next week. (Cross your fingers on this one.)

And worst of all: Hey, did you get this? It’s been a few days… Thanks.

I facepalmed so hard I practically broke Ciara’s nose.

The GOOD upside is that I scrambled and kowtowed a bit and the lovely people at Thought Catalog (87,000 Twitter followers, 34,000 friends on Facebook) published one of my older posts. I hope to get a few more up soon over there. Go on over and take a look, won’t you?

And please don’t stare if you see Ciara and her misshapen nose.

BONUS TECHNOLOGY FAIL PARABLE

Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved a boy very much, and in celebration of this love the girl and boy had lots and lots of fun together. The girl hoped that things would progress to the point where they could have fun together forever, and stop having fun with other people, and she could buy him shirts and pack his lunch every day.

As couples in this modern age are wont to do, one misty gloaming they decided to use the girl’s camera phone to document some particularly fun fun they were having. Oh, they laughed and laughed until they were breathless from this fun, and the pictures they took of the fun were a delight unto them.

Because they were modern and wise and internet savvy, the boy and girl knew that they should not keep those pictures, lest they wind up on Facebook where the boy and girl’s friends might see them and be…sad…that they had missed all that…fun. Plus, some fun should just be remembered in your head, and not stored in a digital file, because otherwise it could get sent to your boss when your web account is inevitably hacked.

And lo, they solemnly deleted those photos together that very day, while cuddling on the boy’s couch and metaphorically smoking a cigarette, or whatever.

But then–tragedy!  Only two days after that magical bout of fun, on that same couch even, the boy told the girl that he did not love her and never would and that he was going to go start having fun with other people, and that she should please not call him any more, ever, here’s a tissue see you later.

And there was much sadness in the kingdom of the girl, and little rejoicing, and her fields lay fallow, despite the fact that they were definitely not going to be fertile forever, and everyone knew that.

And so it was that the girl engaged in the grieving rituals known to her people, and logged on to Picasa to moon over/delete all of her pictures of the boy while eating premium ice cream.

And it was then that she did know that, despite her honest intentions and best efforts, the above-mentioned pictures of the recent and much-lamented fun had been automatically uploaded to her Picasa account because she had downloaded some stupid photo app and not read the permissions, because the permissions are boring.

So there she sat, in sweatpants, with a broken heart and a badly bruised ego and some very detailed and easily identifiable pictures of her lost love having fun. What should she do? Should she keep them, to remind her when she was lonely of the excellent, transcendent fun she used to have with the boy? Should she create a Tumblr for the pictures and name it after the boy, including his middle initial and place of employment? Should she print them out and send them to his house in a heart-shaped box with a creepy smiley-face sticker on it?

Reader, she deleted them. She deleted them every way she knew how, with every utility she could find. She didn’t even keep them for five minutes.

But she was forced to ask herself: Would the boy have done the same? Would ANY boy? Would most girls have deleted them, even, especially when they were as sad and angry and–it could be argued–irrational as the girl was right then?

The girl vowed never to be in a position again where she would have to worry about the answer to these questions.  And so, reader, should you.