02 July 2015
Send and Unsend
By Chin Chin
It was all very well for Edith Piaf to sing “Je ne regrette rien” but for most of us reality is rather different. The thoughtless word that gives too much away, the bon mot that turns out not to be so bon after all, that order on the internet which you realise was priced per bottle not per dozen just after you pressed “buy”, we all put our foot in it from time to time and normally we realise our mistake as soon as we have made it. From the spy who blurts out a state secret to his Russian mistress to the husband who says what he really thinks of his wife’s dress, the order of events is familiar. It begins with the hubristic impulse to fill a gap in the conversation or to get something off your chest. Then there are the fatal words which sound all right at the time. Next comes nemesis: your risqué joke is met with a terrible hush; you realise that the charming girl who you have been impressing by slagging off your client is in fact its chief executive; or the man to whom you have been recommending your Cayman banker is an officer of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. If only, oh if only, you could put the clock back.
Well, the good news is that Google has now made it possible. Not in conversation, you understand – the actual reversing of sound waves is still beyond even their capabilities – but if you send an email which you immediately regret, the new “unsend” facility will, well, unsend it. Actually you will have to be pretty quick because you have to press the button within thirty seconds of the email being sent. That means that the process will be rather like switching off a burglar alarm. There is plenty of time to press the button if you get on with it but not enough time to go to the loo or have a cup of coffee. One difference, of course, is that a failure to unsend in time won’t result in your being surrounded by policemen – unless, of course, the recipient was in the KGB after all.
When I first heard about this I assumed that it was all done by some sort of virtual drone. The unsend button would send it racing through your broadband smiting any outgoing emails which it overtook. Perhaps thirty seconds was the biggest lead it could make up as it scuttled down the wire, haring along like a cyclist in a pursuit event. In fact it turns out I was wrong and that the truth is much more prosaic. If you switch on the unsend facility, your computer will simply sit on all emails for thirty seconds before sending them, to see if you cancel them or not. You could get much the same result, and a longer period for reflection, if you went to have a cup of coffee before dispatching them. Technically I find this a little disappointing. More to the point, however, it is not a new idea and Google owes me some royalties.
When I was young, my father wrote a lot of letters and on occasion he could be an irascible correspondent. When particularly annoyed, he would wait until the sun had sunk below the yardarm and then, fortified by a stiff one, he would put his thoughts into writing. He would then hand me the letter and say that it needed posting immediately. I would immediately run to the post box which stood in the road at the end of our garden before returning to confirm that his instructions had been carried out. He would thank me, mutter that that would “show them” and celebrate with another drink. Then, at dinner, he would go silent, wishing perhaps that he had not been quite so blunt. He would ask my mother what she thought and when he didn’t get the reassurance he was looking for, would go quieter still. After a bit he would ask me if I was sure that the letter had been posted and when I confirmed that it had, he would ask me another favour.
It is I believe an offence to interfere with Her Majesty’s mails but people in North Essex know each other well and it would have been a hard-hearted postman who did not, at seven in the morning, return to the small boy who stood by the box the letter which had been “posted in error”. Now I never liked being up early at all and to get up to retrieve a letter was about as bad as it got, so once this had happened a couple of times I devised a system. If late in the evening I was given a letter to be posted immediately, I would take it but secretly place it on the shelf in the hall. If the instructions were not countermanded, I could post it next day. More often, however, that sort of letter needed to be recalled and then, when asked if I had really posted it, I would say: “not yet, actually, but I will do so before I go to bed”. Honour was satisfied and the peace of the nation preserved.
Those readers who are scientifically-minded will by now have spotted that Google has simply stolen my plan. True, there are differences in detail – the cooling-off period at home lasted for more than thirty seconds – but it is a poor thief of intellectual property who does not change it slightly to conceal the crime. Still, they have been caught now and like a Taylor Swift Mark II I shall pursue them for my rights. Meanwhile, though, I have spent some of my earnings in advance. A helicopter, a Rembrandt, a place in the south of France. As someone whose idea is being used all over the world, I will surely be able to afford all these. Anyway, they looked so good on the Internet that I was unable to resist. Do you think I made a mistake? Hmm, well, perhaps you are right. That gives me just fifteen seconds to find that Unsend button.
