Lying Made Easy

Like many people we have an alarm clock in our bedroom. And like most time conscious people we set that clock ahead 10-20mins so we never over sleep or arrive late (although we normally arrive late). We are not lying to anyone but ourselves – mind trick?

Recently, Gmail (Google’s email service) has introduced what they call Gmail Custom Time. With this new feature you can pre-date your messages to the time you wanted your email sent and make emails look like they’ve been read all along. Making the recipient of the email fooled into believing they made the mistake.  Great idea, but ethical?

Who hasn’t wished they could go back in time and sent that crucial email that could have changed everything? To have the ability to avoid missing deadlines, missing birthdays and missed opportunities. They make it look like you remembered. Gmail has made is easy to lie using the one sacred system – Time

Like God – Time never lies. Your watch may tick long or short, the clock could be frozen, but you can never turn back or forward the hands of time – until now. I’m sure many people are excited about this Gmail feature but trust in regards to time has been compromised. Next time I get an email late and find it in the inbox later I will doubt.

The funniest part is they have done research and have concluded that allowing too many pre-dated emails would cause people to lose faith in the accuracy of time, thus rendering the feature useless. They even have a mathematical theorem for it. By the way, they say more than ten per year is too much.

I guess the next question – Will I use It?