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Confessions of an E-mail Junkie
February 4, 2000

Hi, my name is Chris, and I am a recovering e-mail addict.

There is no clinical name for my affliction. There are no medical studies to identify the causes, symptoms and possibly even, a cure.

But I know what I've got, and I know I'm not alone. I see the others in airport lounges, hotels, convention centers, even at the pool or golf course. We exchange knowing glances as we nervously clutch our laptops in one hand, our phone cards in another.

We're looking for a place to plug in our PCs - where we can hear that reassuring dial tone, followed by seven rapid pulses and the familiar sound of a thousand fingernails on a chalkboard, followed by silence, and then, a tortured moment later, the sight of data packets dancing across the screen.

It's the crack cocaine of e-commerce -- the e-mail hit. It's pure, unadulterated digital satisfaction.

When I wrote about this malady nearly two years ago, in my very first column about travel technology, I mocked e-mail addicts. I suggested they were a small group of frequent travelers that were being preyed on by companies that peddled connectivity trinkets such as phone adapters and filters.

One of the most memorable responses I received came from technology guru Richard Eastman. The Newport Beach, Calif., consultant sent the story to some of his constituents with a note acknowledging that many tech-travelers are indeed a pathetic group of junkies.

I never imagined I'd become one of them.

How I did isn't as interesting a story as how I kicked the habit. E-mail is the kind of thing that grows on you very gradually. Instead of calling someone, you e-mail. Instead of sending a paper letter, you e-mail.

Instead of visiting in person, you e-mail. Soon you're getting hundreds of electronic messages a day - and sending hundreds back. Next thing you know, the filter settings on your Outlook are more complex than the algorithms used by a computer reservations system to calculate airfares.

Then you find yourself craving an e-mail hit all the time. In the morning, when you wake up, the little voice inside your head screams, must check e-mail. At the airport on a layover, it grates, where's the closest Internet kiosk? At the hotel, faced with an outrageous $1.50 charge for local calls, the voice argues, it's a small price to pay for being plugged in.

One day it all comes crashing down. In my case, I was all set to go on assignment to Bermuda when my laptop gave up the ghost.

The timing couldn't have been any worse. A week before Christmas, I was near the conclusion of two extremely challenging sets of contract negotiations - yes, even columnists have to renegotiate their contracts - and e-mail had been our preferred method of communicating. A one-week absence would almost certainly doom the talks to failure.

When I arrived on the island, I didn't know how long I could go without logging on. A few hours? Maybe a day?

When I discovered that the hotel I was staying at, a hoity-toity resort called Horizons that's perched on a hill overlooking the azure waters of the Atlantic, I practically panicked. Golf resorts like this don't exactly come with a fully equipped business center.

I became irritable, nervous, and crabby. Could I be experiencing withdrawals?

As gale-force winds hammered against my hotel window that evening, I tossed in my sleep. I imagined the unanswered e-mails stacking up in my box. They hovered above my bed like electronic sheep that refused to jump.

The next morning I felt a little better. It had now been almost 24 hours since the last time I clicked the "send/receive message" icon and felt that gratifying rush of bits and bytes filling my "in" box.

The storm had passed outside. It was time to do what I'd come to Bermuda for: to dive. In Scuba, you adopt a somewhat fatalistic attitude. It isn't the months of training that are required to progress from an open-water diver to divemaster as much as it is the forms you sign before they let you board a boat, in which you agree to hold the operator harmless if you should try to recreate any scene from the shark thriller Deep Blue Sea that involve using scientists as fish bait.

As I explored the wreck of the US Coast Guard Cutter Hermes under 80 feet of water, the same fatalism seemed to spill over into my feelings about being disconnected. To paraphrase my old colleague John Riepe, lack of e-mail didn't affect the cooling of the sun in the slightest.

What did it matter if I spent a day or a week without a PC? In the overall scheme of things, it really didn't make a difference.

The steps I took toward recovery were small but significant. I didn't mention a word about my connection woes to Mike Heslop, the boat's captain. Nor did I once talk about my painful withdrawals with the nice couple from New Jersey or their two teen-age children. Instead, I allowed the cool waters inside the reef to wash over my raging e-mail fever.

No one knew how therapeutic this dive trip had become. I ended up going a whole week without once checking my messages.

A whole week!

As the days went on, I was astonished to find that I cared less and less about my e-mail. I was even more shocked to find that by the end of my stay on the island, I didn't care at all. When I returned to my office to find that the negotiations weren't just going badly, but had effectively collapsed, I shrugged them off.

"Cooling of the sun," I kept repeating to myself. "Cooling of the sun..."

Of course, by the time this is published, I'll be back to checking my e-mail almost as regularly as before. But at least I will have answered the question; Can I live without the messages?

The answer is yes, absolutely.

I think the number of travelers (both business and leisure) who can say that, too, is shrinking at a disturbing rate. The polls that would bolster my theory remain elusive, but the anecdotal evidence is plentiful.

Look no further than the number of new hotels that are being rewired for high-speed Internet access, the proliferation of Internet cafes and kiosks at airports, and the sheer volume of new gadgets that offer wireless Web access.

We travelers are hooked, plain and simple. And the only cure can't possibly be a business trip to Bermuda, with all due respect to its wonderfully efficient department of tourism.

So how have you managed to curb the addictive nature of e-mail? Do you limit yourself to checking messages a set number of times every day? Do you go "e-mail free" on weekends? Do you make an effort to use the phone and regular mail, too? E-mail me with your thoughts and I'll include them in a future column. Be sure to include your full name and city of residence.

This story was also published on Biztravel.com.