“What kind of life am I living that I am 4 days behind on email......”
The neglected message was not a customer emergency or a broken server. It was a thread about naming a Volkswagen van.
My contribution was Axl.
I also announced that Axl would be the name of my first son. This felt like a perfectly reasonable thing to add to a discussion about somebody else's van.
The four-day delay was sitting right there in my reply. I had just started a director role at Shutterstock and was also talking about Ops Dojo outside of work. There was plenty happening. The email itself did not offer a grand explanation. It just caught me arriving late to an extremely low-stakes conversation and noticing how far behind I was.
The whole reply was small enough to fit between much larger things. One question about my life. One vote for the van. One joke about a future kid. That was it.
I like that the message is not important. The inbox was full of work, and this was not work. Nobody needed a plan, a status report, or a technical answer from me. Friends were naming a Volkswagen. I was late to that too.
Four days is not a dramatic amount of time. It was enough for me to look at the date, look at the thread, and ask the question out loud. The number was funny because the conversation was so simple. I did not need four days to think of Axl. I needed four days to get back to the thread.
I answered the thread. I made the unnecessary declaration about a hypothetical child. My vote was Axl.
Axl was still a good name.