It was an email from someone. The contents were not very important. I would have deleted the email and thought no more of it in routine course of things. But it was a bit different. At the bottom of the email was a single line in italics: ‘sent from my iPad’. When the email was seen by a colleague who was also working on the same project in connection with which the email had been sent to us, he said “What is the idea of putting that line at the bottom?”
I could see that he was not very happy with it.
“It is a marketing strategy” I explained to him. “The manufacturers of such gadgets program their gadgets so that such a line is inserted automatically at the end of every email sent from the gadgets.”
“What does it achieve? It just makes the recipients feel bad that they don’t have such gadgets” he said angrily.
“That is the crux of the matter” I said. “When one feels jealous of someone who has that gadget, one goes and buys one so that he too has it. That improves sales. In the meantime, the person who possesses that gadget keeps feeling good that he has that gadget and the world knows about it. It is like flaunting what one has got. If you send an email using a Blackberry phone, the end of the email will have a line in italics ‘sent from my Blackberry’. I could give you a number of examples of what men and women flaunt, besides gadgets that send emails.”
“No, thanks” he said with a half smile. “I don’t want to possess gadgets which I don’t need, and don’t want to flaunt what I got.”
If you get angry with people who flaunt these gadgets, you could get back at them” I said.
“How?” He seemed to like the idea of getting back at them.
“You could manually type the following at the end of your reply to such emails. Put it in italics. You could save a text file with this text in it, for use any time you want. If you do not want to make the effort again and again, you could put that as your signature by going into settings of your email service, where people usually put their names or positions.”
The text for email signature could be as follows. Readers could make alterations in it to suit their own sense of sarcasm.
‘Sent from my iPad, my Samsung Galaxy, my BlackBerry Playbook, my BlackBerry, my iPhone 4S, my Windows Phone, and my Samsung Galaxy Nexus.’
