Yesterday, on account of #snowpocalypse2010, I didn’t get mail. Fine by me, although surprising. Until yesterday, the mailman has always had a Santa-down-the-chimney mystique about him (or her, as the case may be). What happened, I wondered, to “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”? Well, as it turns out, that’s not actually an official USPS motto. I digress, but only to come to the point that the golden age of snail mail took an official/symbolic (according to me) turn for the lackluster yesterday. What’s next? No Saturday delivery? Awww snap.

Getting shut out on good old fashioned snail mail made me think of the following video, which somehow found me recently via the social media. As you probably know by now, things today find you. So no email or mail was involved in the reception of the video in which comedian Jim Breuer spends a couple minutes with the guy who voiced the famed AOL “You’ve got mail” salutation (as it turns out, in 1989 on a cassette deck—legit!).

“You don’t get a check for that?” Good stuff.

So, it’s cool to attach a face to the voice of email’s/internet’s childhood/adolescence. Okay, so it’s definitely a bit of a bummer the guy (Elwood, btw) seemingly didn’t make much dough from the once big-time SOT. AOL still uses the “You’ve got mail” welcome, but dial-up is essentially dead (way past peak?) and “You’ve got mail” is a symbol of the emergence dial-up and the cultural permeation of email. You were excited to receive your email and the “You’ve got mail!” salutation resonated that excitement of the golden age of email. “You’ve got mail” is now an anachronism. Courtesy of our fast connections, we’re drowning in email. Email itself, some argue, is going the way of dial-up. I’ve heard the argument and find it far-fetched, but stranger things have happened.

At least the AOL guy still has his day job…in TV.

Cross-posted on usblog.havasdigital.com