One of the advantages of the day job is that I don't have to be in until 10 a.m., so I can sleep until 9:15 or 9:20 or so and still only be ten or so minutes late to work. I am nocturnal. I am not a morning person. Morning is bad. Morning is evil. Getting up in the morning is one of the worst things I have to do all day.
This late bedtime is because I've got the day job, the radio shows, the school, the friends, the extracurricular musical activities, the attempted social life, the reading, the writing, the web site, plus I'm online a lot. Lots of stuff to do. So...
Why doesn't he answer my e-mail, the bastard?
Please try to remember that I do this website and handle its resultant email in my spare time, when I have spare time. This is not my living; this is not my full-time job. I am not at the computer 24 hours a day. Though I read every piece of mail I get, and I promise I'll try as best as I can to answer it all, please understand that sometimes I just can't. I'm only human.
Actually, I've been getting quite a bit better at replying to mail in the last couple of months. I've cut my mailing lists down to just two food-related ones and one social one. But still ... I run at least one to two weeks behind on my website-related email.
I read and appreciate every single piece of email I get. If you've emailed me and it's taken me weeks to respond, or if I don't respond at all, I truly and sincerely apologize. I'm so busy that I tend to get way behind in my email, and the problem is exacerbated everytime I leave town for more than a day. For instance, when I got back from my nearly month-long trip to eastern Europe in March-April of 1996, I had almost 2,500 messages waiting for me ... *groan*. Mailing lists, website-generated mail, personal mail, it tends to pile up. I do what I can -- some mail I'll answer the same day, some I'll put off if I'm too busy, and it might take weeks.
If you're asking me for a recipe that's not on my page and you don't hear back from me, it's probably not going to appear on the page anytime soon. I also don't have the time to be a recipe research service. People write to me asking if I have the recipe for some dish they had in some restaurant. If it's not on the page, I don't have it.
People also write to me asking me to do things like come up with an entire custom menu for a dinner party for them, or to research some point about the history of Creole food or a particular dish for them. I'm sorry, but I don't have time to do this kind of thing, unless you want to pay me to do it. If that's the case, let's talk.
If you're one of the umpty-ump people who've written to ask me if I have a recipe for Bourbon Chicken ... no, I don't, and such a thing doesn't exist in Louisiana, only in so-called "Cajun" fast-food outlets in malls around America, outlets which generally have no Cajuns anywhere in the kitchen or the home office. No Louisianian I know has ever heard of it, myself included.
If you've emailed me with something truly urgent and it takes too long for you to get a reply from me (particularly if I know you and it's personal mail) just noodge me with the words "ARE YOU ALIVE?" in the subject line of your mail, as some of my friends have done. That tends to get my attention.
If you ever send me email spam (i.e.,
bulk advertising email), I will place your address and/or domain in my spam filter
and will never look at email from your domain again. I'll also probably write to your
ISP and get your account cancelled. Read my policy on this.
Until recently, I did not even accept email from the domains hotmail.com or juno.com, due
to a staggering amount of spam that comes from those sites (although because of promises
from those providers to fight spam, I've removed them from the filter for the time being).
I also use a very robust anti-spam filter, so chances are that if you're a spammer of any kind,
it'll catch you and your mail goes right into the trash, unread. Oh, and I still might actually
dig it out of the trash so I can trace it to your ISP and get your account cancelled.
If you're with an ISP that allows email spamming, I strongly suggest that you dump them and find an ISP that has integrity.
Epilogue
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