Oh no! Don't tell me you're a Webmail guy!

What's the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Head to the bathroom? Brush your teeth? Shower? Take a dump? Maybe you do one of those things ... or maybe you're a nerd like me. The first thing I do when I roll out of my bed is look for my glasses. When you're as visually impaired as I am, this is not always an easy task. It's hard to LOOK for something when you're so blind that you have to pick up the alarm clock and put it against your freaking face to see the clock to make sure you didn't sleep through class. Once I find my glasses, which I usually do, the next thing I do is check my email. No teeth brushing yet, no shower yet, no taking a dump yet. Email first.

Generally, at this morning email check, there's nothing too important — a three-page single-spaced essay from then-USG president Alex Lenahan '07, a Proofpoint Digest summary of all the junk that Princeton kindly filtered out for me and maybe one or two emails from friends with links to YouTube.com. Maybe ... someone will even have tagged me in a facebook.com picture! Tag ... or ... drumroll ... de-tag. Since when did tag stop being that game that annoying little kids play during recess?

When someone asked me how often I check my email, I was kind of amused. Umm ... constantly? With programs like Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird, I am always checking my email. Though quite amazing, this feature has proven to be downright destructive. For many Princeton students like myself who are just slightly obsessive compulsive (or, if you prefer the colloquial, slightly anal), the fact that email refreshes itself every minute can be an incredible time waster. You would think that getting email every minute is enough, but no. That evil "Get Mail" button ... click ... click ... click ... every ... two ... seconds. Constant email checking is the new way to waste time on the computer. It, my friends, is the new Snood.

The real joke's on the kids who haven't moved on past using Webmail. When they're not getting System I/O errors and being told they have zero messages in their inboxes, they're clearly just missing out on the beauty of constant email. "Webmail kids," as we dub these poor folk, are always the last to receive news, since they don't receive their email as it comes. As a recent USG email said, "[The] first 500 people to show up to the C-store get a free bag of candy." If you're a Webmail kid, you didn't get any candy.

Try to imagine how life would be without email. I mean, in some ways, it'd be kind of sweet. You'd never know your final exam schedule, you might not know when papers are due, you wouldn't have to read all that ranting about the grade inflation policy and, heck, you wouldn't have known that Joan Jett (Joan who?) was coming for Dean's Date. Hey man, ignorance is bliss.

I've begun to realize that there is nothing worse than someone with poor email etiquette. For example, we have the friend who sends out an email with a 50 MB video attachment of his dog running around his backyard. Buddy, hate to break it to you, but you just clogged my Inbox ... and your dog is ugly. Or, even worse is the kid who "Replies All" with a stupid question about his midterm grade to your entire class. Like I always say, save your brown-nosing and grade grumbling for office hours ... just like the rest of us.

I've never deleted a single Sent email in my four years at Princeton. There are over 8,000 of them. That's the other cool thing about email. With the advent of things like Gmail.com, you'll never really have to delete anything. The email I sent my freshman year roommate before we arrived on campus is saved. The email reply I sent to a professor who got his boxers in a bunch over one of my columns is saved. The rambling email I sent to my friends this fall at 3:45 a.m. after a night out partying at the Street, for better or for worse, is saved. So now that you've spent the last few minutes reading this ... think ya might have missed an important email? Neel Gehani is an ORFE major from Summit, N.J. He may be reached at ngehani@princeton.edu.