How To

1. Receive an email from your teenager with a subject line “I’m too lazy to walk over to your room so I’m emailing you instead!!!!”

2. Rejoice that you’ve raised such an energy-efficient child.

3. Read the email and learn that your teen and her BFF want to learn a foreign language so that they can talk to each other without other people understanding what they’re saying.

4. Suppress urge to let her know that only dogs can hear what she and her BFF are squealing to each other.

5. Continue to read that they have decided to learn Mandarin as their Secret Language.

6. Call 911 to ask about procedures to reattach your recently bitten off tongue.

7. Continue to read email and learn that there’s a program that’s just $10!!!! and Please send away for it ASAP, I’ll pay you back! THANK YOU!!!

8. Awww, your teen wrote THANK YOU!!! You are the best mom ever!

9. Decide not to answer email until you can come up with a non-sarcastic response.

9. Do not answer email.

10. Ignore follow ups to email.

11. Get the “I’m going to discuss this with daddy” email notice.

12. Do not respond, but silently say goodbye to $10.

13. Overhear discussion with daddy with phrases like “you’ll never learn Mandarin, how about Italian instead?” and “but so many people speak Italian!” Die of laughter.

14. Hear daddy tap in his credit card number.

15. Hear daddy say Very Bad Word.

16. Emerge from bedroom asking whatever is the matter?

17. Learn that the $10 fee is just the sign up fee and that now every month we will be receiving more Mandarin discs at a reasonable price of $60 per shot, although we can return the Mandarin that we do not want for a full refund.

18. Go back to bedroom and close door.

19. Thank the good lord that you Kegeled throughout your pregnancies because laughing now causes absolutely no leakage.

20. Secretly plan to learn Mandarin in order to understand what Teenage Daughter is saying.

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1. Subscribe to an email alert. Perhaps it’s from a local restaurant. That offers a .3% discount if you subscribe to their email alerts.

2. Receive an email update. Think, ooh! an email update! How fun!

3. After two years of daily email updates of such ilk as panini sale! And get ready for summer with our low-fat mozzarella sandwiches, decide to live email update-free.

3. Scroll down to the bottom of the email alert and click on the unsubscribe button. You’re free.

4. Receive a you have successfully unsubscribed from future email updates email update.

5. Rejoice.

6. A few days later, receive an email update.

7. Be unable to understand how something like this could have happened. You clicked unsubscribe. You received a confirmation email. Something is not adding up.

8. Decide that it was a glitch. Glitches happen! No system is perfect! Click unsubscribe again!

9. Repeat steps 4 and 5. But this time, with apprehension.

10. Get an email update.

11. Either click unsubscribe again and/or hit head against wall or any other durable object.

12. Consider changing email address. Pros: no more email updates. Cons: no more email from anyone again ever, unless you send a global email notifying them of your new email.

13. Consider moving out of country and assuming a new identity. Pros: no more email updates. Cons: a lot of work.

14. Consider learning to live with email updates. What’s the worst thing that can happen? It’s not like anyone has ever been murdered by an email update! Pros: nothing to do! Con: you will be the first person to be killed by an email update.

14. Write up a post about your battle with email update. Beam with pride. Everyone will be on your side and will laud you as a modern day e-heroine.

15. Leave post on screen in drafts. See 10 year old son walk by. See him reading it. Beam with more pride. This is blogging, son! Sharing knowledge with others! Hear 10 year old tell you, you know you can just mark it spam, right?

16. Vow never to leave post accessible to children again.

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