Sunday, June 29, 2003
Hope
We get random email traffic through the webmaster account all the time from people that couldn't find what they were looking for, but it's usually pretty mundane stuff like "how do I transfer these credits?" or "I'm looking for so-and-so that used to teach there." I take a quick look to see if it's spam that made it past the filters, decide who it should have been addressed to in the first place, mumble a curse under my breath about lazy people and shuffle it off to the appropriate group.
Today, for a few minutes, that routine died. There was an email titled "my 6 year old son suffered a catastophic brain injury" in the in-box, with a short one paragraph message inside asking for the contact info of a certain faculty member working in the neurosciences. They offered to help with his research by volunteering in any way they could, hoping to speed up a possible cure for their child.
My stupid worries were as if they never were. Instead, a quick flash of
an image long forgotten, it popped through my head, a man standing on a small rock in water. The lab I worked at for my first three years in college had a poster of
Awakenings on the wall. I had mixed feelings looking at it. Sometimes it would get me down in the middle of the night when I was toiling away. Sometimes it would make me think of the researchers with respect for their chosen profession.
Monday morning update: my email filter threw the message into the spam folder. I now wonder simultaneously about the authenticity of the message and the possibility of my filter having thrown away genuine cries for help in the past.
