62,391 emails

I have become a very orderly person. By necessity. When you're a one-woman office, you get all the perks and all the work. Multitasking is my middle name. Laundry and research. Vacuuming and conceptualizing. Emails and teleconferences.

So the first thing I do every morning is check for emails and clean out my inbox. If more than a dozen have collected overnight, I start to hyperventilate, thinking something has gone seriously wrong with a project.

So when I used my father's computer recently and saw an inbox stuffed with 62,391 emails, I was gobsmacked. I didn't think that large an accumulation was even possible.

Now, I do a lot of online ordering, and every order automatically subscribes me to one or more newsletters or emails or other customer-relationship vehicles. This makes me religious about hunting down and clicking the teeny tiny "unsubscribe" links at the bottom of the page. Just about every time I get the immediate response: "Please tell us why you want to unsubscribe."

I never have because I don't know exactly what to say. "You and thousands of others send me too many emails." "I find your constant messages a distraction while I'm working." "I just wanted a pair of jeans, not a relationship."

Now I have the perfect response: "I don't want to follow in my father's footsteps."