God and my E-mail

I’ve been a member of AOL for as long as I can remember.  I don’t know when, exactly, I started my e-mail account – but it must have been a few months after AOL started.  For years I paid $10 a month for something like 500 minutes on a dial-up modem.  And for years we had to hope we didn’t get important calls while I was going on line to check my e-mails.  Oh, those were the modem squealing days.  It was slow, it was a pain, but there was no other way to get on the “Information Super Highway!”

Note:  This was loooong before Facebook and blogs and Youtube, etc.  To get on AOL you had to use floppy, yes, floppy discs.  They came in the mail, they were stuck in magazines, they were given out.

Also note:  At this time I had an IBM Computer with a 12” full color monitor.  It ran at 12 megahertz and had a whopping 40 megabyte hard drive.  For youse kids out there with your cell phones and MP3 players and cameras....1 GIG is 1000 megabytes.  That 4 gigabyte flash drive?  That is 4000 megs.  That is 100 TIMES larger than my first computer’s hard drive.  And one Terabyte is 1000 gigabytes.  This computer cost us about $1,300 from Costco.  I could go to Best Buy today and buy 3 laptops for the same amount we paid.

Soon after buying the computer I sold my ENTIRE Nintendo System – and about 50 games – to a friend so I could get enough money for a sound card (a move I still regret today).  I then also purchased a program called a “stacker” that would make my 40 meg hard drive into an 80 meg hard drive.

Still – it was soon after I was entering the computer age – that I had to get a modem and get on-line.  Who the hell was e-mailing me anyway?  I took a quick look on my AOL account now and, sadly, my e-mail only goes back to 2003.  That’s 9 YEARS AGO.  But it was new and exciting and I was on AOL which meant I was cool.

Cut to 2012.  AOL isn’t cool any more.  At least to my friend Keith, and he makes a valid point.  If he’s doing business with someone that is purporting to be “hip,” “with-it,” and “now.”  They can’t have grandma’s AOL account.  But since I’ve had it for forever and it’s free.  What’s to stop me from using it.

A few weeks ago, though, I got an interesting e-mail.  It was from “Almighty God” and he had a message for me.  I opened the e-mail (well, certainly, God wouldn’t send SPAM) and it was the “Time for war, time for peace...” scripture out of the Bible.  But here’s what confused me...this e-mail went into my SPAM box.  I would think that the “Almighty,” the “Head Honcho,” “The Big Cheese,” would somehow get around the SPAM filter.  Either AOL has a kick-ass SPAM filter that even filters out God or, God has to fix the way he e-mails.

After I read that e-mail, I noticed I haven’t received any more e-mails from “Almighty God.”  Well, maybe someday he’ll contact me again.  But I do look in my SPAM folder occasionally to see if God is trying to contact me.