It's inappropriate and immature to make fun of old people struggling with technology, which is why I won't do so here. However, old people are often forced into stumbling adorably through totally foreign (to them) technology, which is what I want to discuss today.

Victor started his IT career years ago at his university, helping a neuroscience professor keep after his lab. His work involved mundane tasks, like taking care of a small LAN, tracking down experiment results, and preparing graphs and such. At the time, his professor was 84 years young.

Professor Oldy McOlderton picked up email with relative ease. He'd frequently check for new messages and his students appreciated his attentiveness. One quirk that Victor noticed, though, was that he'd always BCC himself on each message he sent. He was aware but skeptical of the "Sent Mail" folder, favoring his inbox as a repository for all received and sent messages.

Because of the Professor's preference, he asked Victor to change the software so that his BCC'd messages would appear to be coming from the person he was sending the email to. For example, he'd send an email like this:

To:   [another professor]
BCC:  [himself]

This would then come back to his inbox like:

To:   [another professor]
From: [himself]
BCC:  [himself]

...but he wanted it to look like:

To:   [another professor]
From: [another professor]

Victor explained that this was, in fact, impossible with the way email works, and went on to explain why it works the way it does.

"Well, call the person in charge of Email and get it changed!"

Victor pretended to look into it, told the professor that the representative from Email Headquarters said they couldn't change it, and the professor dropped the topic. Until six months later when it came up again. It came up a total of four times. To this day, the professor is BCCing himself on every message. So, Email, if you're out there reading this, please change how your BCC functionality works.

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