i had a falling out with a friend (that wasn't so much a falling-out as an "i'm blowing you off and doing it in a really passive aggressive, malicious manner") that started a few months ago. after not hearing from this person for awhile, i just sent a more-diplomatic-than-i-feel 'fuck you' e-mail. i just sort of laid it out on the table and told them how i felt. if there was anything left to salvage in the friendship (which there ain't) i wouldn't have done it, but ironically the fact that there's nothing left to salvage makes the whole thing pointless. i've never sent one before, and it feels both good and bad.
caveat: the email did not contain the phrase "fuck you", but it was implied i think.
― gear (gear), Monday, 6 February 2006 23:49 (nineteen years ago)
ironically sending a telegram is no longer an option:
Sometime on Friday, Jan. 27, Western Union, bowing to the ascendancy of modern technology like e-mail, sent its last telegram.
Western Union had its beginnings in 1851 in Rochester. Messages were transmitted by Morse code over wire, then hand-delivered by a courier. Ten years later, the company completed the first transcontinental telegraph line.
That drove the Pony Express, which had been operating for less than two years, out of business by offering customers delivery of a message across the country in less than a day (the average Pony Express delivery took 10 days). In the relatively recent era of e-mail and instant messaging, telegrams were usually delivered by overnight courier services.
A sampling of some of the last telegrams wired on the last day included birthday wishes and efforts by a few people, probably Western Union employees, to send the final message. The company had no information about the time of the very last message or the cities it bridged. At the height of business in 1929, more than 200 million telegrams were sent around the world. Just under 21,000 were sent last year.
Western Union's core business has long been money transfers, which the company first began offering in 1871. The service allows people to send any amount of cash to family members, bypassing banks. To handle the transfers, the company has 271,000 locations — 80 percent of them outside the United States — in more than 200 countries.
If money transfer services and business communications were central to Western Union's portfolio, it was the telegram message that captured the popular imagination.
Personal news, births, deaths and travel itineraries were wired around the world. Telegrams, which customers paid for by the word, developed a syntax all their own, with short phrases and the use of the word "stop" to end sentences.
For decades, telegrams were the fastest and most cost-efficient way to communicate, and organizations of every kind used them.
― m coleman (lovebug starski), Tuesday, 7 February 2006 00:17 (nineteen years ago)
I once dated someone and after we split, she started dating one of our mutual acquaintances. Then after
they split,
he sent her a "fuck you" e-mail, only he sent me a blind CC, too. Then when I told him I didn't want any part of their spat, he sent me a "fuck you" e-mail, too.
― Paul Ess (Paul Ess), Tuesday, 7 February 2006 03:23 (nineteen years ago)
what i REALLY REALLY loved about the last day of the western union telegram is that clearly new organizations (which were among the very first users of the telegram, after shipping magnates, etc.) had GEARED UP on the story, quite late out the gate; they had just caught wind of it a day or two before it was to happen, or at least didn't report on it til quite close to the day, and the story BEGS, SHRIEKS for what that last telgram was, so it could printed in all the papers and perhaps framed forever in some telegraph museum in the sky, but western union was like "mm we're really not sure which one was the last, we just shut it down, sorry." take that, nostalgists!
― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Tuesday, 7 February 2006 03:24 (nineteen years ago)
The "fuck you" telegram seems like a last-ditch attempt to salvage the friendship. If you really were through with the friendship, you wouldn't have paid the $35 for the telegram, or wasted your time. No one sends a telegram without secretly wanting to get one back.
― Dave will do (dave225.3), Tuesday, 7 February 2006 13:00 (nineteen years ago)