YOU HAVE MAIL

William J. Fung

Chapter 2: Offer and Acceptance

Within this email message that he wrote, he was being very careful not to scare Kay away with sounding too conceited, and long-winded. He mentioned that he saw her webpage, and loved it's design, which was a lie. Her webpage was of the most basic layout he had ever seen. There were no frames, no animated GIFs, no decent background, and no special effects. The webpage only consisted of text and several pictures, and the text was displayed in a way to make it difficult to read. He mentioned a few short facts about himself, such as his name and where he was from, and that he was also looking for a penpal, which was also a lie. The truth of the matter being that he stumbled upon her, but she didn't need to know that. He then concluded the email message with a RSVP, and a pseudo-signature file, which consisted of his name and email, and one line from a song. Jay really liked the idea of having a perpetually changing signature file, so he used different lines from different songs each time. Jay reread the message that he had just created, and noticed that it sounded really polite, even charming. Perfect. He sent the message on its way, realizing that he probably would not receive a reply.

A couple of days pass, and Jay was once again online. This time, he was doing his routine daily email checking, which he does more than daily. He looked at the new messages he received. A couple of pieces of tasteless internet humour, one which he deleted immediately after reading, and the other filed away, and a message from Hong Kong. At first, he was perplexed as to why he was receiving an email message from Hong Kong, but after a few seconds, it occurred to him. It was Kay. He quickly read over the subject heading, and it read "Penpal App Approved". Jay got off his chair, and did a little victory dance in front of his computer. After realizing how stupid he looked, he read the message.

Being extremely skeptical at the actually meaning behind the message, he read slowly. This was necessary for two reasons. First of all, he wanted to be sure he didn't get the wrong idea about what Kay was saying to him. Secondly, since she was from Hong Kong, it was quite apparent that her competency with the English language was not up to Canadian specifications. This showed through in numerous grammatical and spelling errors.

Kay's email message consisted of a greeting, and several questions to Jay about where he was from. As far as Jay could tell, Kay was so excited to get his message that she had completely lost her mind, forgetting most of what Jay had actually written. Then, in the next paragraph it appeared to Jay that she had regained her senses, as she asked him if he was on his summer vacation, and how he found her webpage, since she was surprised that someone actually saw her's. She also mentioned that she will be updating her webpage soon and that she would tell Jay about it. She ended the greeting by asking Jay if he had a webpage, and said that she wants to hear from Jay again as soon as possible.

© Copyright 1998 William Fung

On to Chapter 3

Back to You Have Mail Index

Back to Main

This page is hosted by Get your free homepage