The Digital (R)Age

So I'm waiting on quite a few interesting emails. Well, quite a few by my standards anyway: more than one. One is exactly the same as almost every other A-Level student at this time of year: "something on your UCAS application has changed!" Now is that, or is that not, the cruellest, nastiest, most teasing cliffhanger in the History of Everything? Because the email you receive doesn't actually TELL you which whether you've been accepted or rejected, what your conditional grades are, or even which Uni has replied -- just that "something has changed." This was particularly soul-destroying on my first day on holiday, when I saw that teasing email, immediately opened a new tab to log on to the UCAS website (forgetting that our laptop is allergic to multiple tabs) and the whole machine promptly crashed. When I eventually DID get onto the UCAS site (some twenty minutes and several screaming fits later), it turned out to be good news, but I still heartily disapprove of this method.

The other email I am waiting for is (most likely) a rejection. This is because I have been sending my 'new book' off for about five months now, and having amassed a substantial pile of about fourteen rejections, I'm reaching the critical decision period. This decision basically boils down to this: should I continue to pay for my own misery, or stick two fingers up at the professionals and chuck my new manuscript on a shelf, where it will gather dust until the day when I WILL BE a published author. In any case, at the minute I'm simply delaying the decision whilst waiting for the last few agents on my 'First Choices' list to email back.

This basically means that everytime I log on to my email account (I'm not gonna lie, this is at least six times a day, some of them barely minutes apart) and see that little yellow envelope, and the words '1 Unread Message', I pretty much hit the roof. Which makes it particularly heartbreaking when you glance at the 'Sender' column to see that one, mocking little word. Facebook. *sigh*