Is 10 p.m. too late to email?

My friend Jon has Verizon's best voice and data plan, and he's always available. In theory, anyway. His phone can receive voice calls, email, text messages, SMS, Jotts, etc.

Yet he's earned the dubious distinction of The Friend Most Difficult to Reach. My calls always go to voicemail. My emails sometimes get answered, though very briefly (because he's typing on a three-inch wide keyboard). For those of us over 30, text messaging is the last ditch attempt at communication, more like semaphore or morse code than a way to exchange information.

We are too connected. Today's world is so connected that we've stopped communicating. Replying to an email or text message is an unloved chore to get out of the way. Dashing off a quick email is a desperate, breathless gasp to keep our noses above waterline, a chest-tightening attempt to keep our various inboxes under control. I count that I have 13 inboxes, four of which funnel to one place, three to another, and the rest to individual locations. How many inboxes have you?

Voicemail is worse. It takes many times longer to listen to a voicemail than to read an email. And because of the speaker's worried performance distraction (Does my voice sound pleasant? Am I enunciating clearly? Am I coherent?), it often takes longer to get to the point and longer still for the listener to catch the speaker's intent.

Sometimes late at night, as I'm viciously, ruthlessly slashing off curt and poorly thought-out replies from my inbox, I find myself wondering, "Gee, is 10 p.m. too late to email? What if Jon has forgotten to turn off his phone and it wakes him?". Sadly, one of the most useful features of email is that you don't have to actively receive it - it waits for you, for the time that's best for you to read it (late at night, perhaps). So I hesitate to send that midnight email, for fear that email's most useful features, instant delivery anywhere in the world at any time of day or night, might actually irritate my friend.

And then I remember he deserves it. How dare he fill my inbox.