Beer Goggles for your E-mail

Google has apparently come up with an application called Mail Goggles that sets up some barriers to sending e-mail during certain hours. The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a piece that suggests that this might help curb inappropriate e-mails from students to professors.

I appreciate the Chronicle's benefit-of-the-doubt approach on inappropriate student e-mail, but I'd be stunned to find out that alcohol was behind more than a tiny percentage of inappropriate student e-mail to professors for several reasons.

1. I just don't believe students are thinking about us when they get drunk. Please God, don't let them be thinking about us when they're drunk.

2. If it were just alcohol, the inappropriate e-mails would have started with the advent of e-mail and would have likely remained steady, or at least only risen in proportion to the difference between drinkers today and drinkers 15 years ago. I've not noticed that to be the case. I've noticed a serious spike in inappropriate e-mail over the past 5 years. And I seem as likely to get it at 2:00 in the afternoon as at 2:00 in the morning (which could, I guess, just mean that some students are drunk all the damn time).

3. I think it's poor impulse control. Two things seem to really suppress one's impulse control: drinking and adolescence. Having ruled out drinking in my own mind, I'm going with adolescence. I think that today's 20-somethings are in an extended adolescence that is a by-product of both generational characteristics and extended lifespan. If you have, as the song says, "100 years to live," then there's no big hurry to jump into real life at the tender age of 25. Or seen another way: if you and your children are going to live to 80 or 100, what's the big hurry in pushing them out of the nest?