Perhaps This Just Isn't My Forte

Recently my mom sent me a frantic email informing me that she'd gotten in touch with a high-up at a major multinational firm (referred to here as Firm X) and had a contact for me to get in touch with to set up an internship for this year in Germany. Of course I excitedly got to work on translating my resume and a cover letter into German to send to this contact. Last night I finally got all the editing done with the help of some of the Germans in my dorm, who corrected my grammar and wording. With a flourish of a click, I sent off the email and its attached documents, eager to be rid of them and to have it done. They were on their way to a VP of Firm X. I'll repeat that. He's a Vice-President.

Later, while looking over the freshly-sent documents for the 1,000th time, I realized I'd forgotten to put an umlaut over the u in "Grüssen," the closing salutation of the German cover letter. This is especially ironic considering that in the previous paragraph I had named my "excellent German langugage ability" as one of my skills. As embarassing as that was, I didn't lose any sleep over it.

However, when the alarm went off this morning in the dark pre-dawn hours of the day, I slapped it off, and, realizing my grevious error only now, sat straight up in bed and gasped in horror.

The subject line.

I had forgotten to type something in the subject line. I had sent it blank.

Somewhere in an inbox doubtlessly filled with hundreds of other important emails (many far more important than mine) is an email from little old me, a college student begging for scraps of someone's time, with nothing to set it apart other than my name.

Microsoft Outlook be damned for not including a failsafe that prompts you when you try to send a blank-subject-line message, like in Thunderbird. This, Mr. Gates, is just one of many reasons why I hate your software.

Perhaps this just isn't my forte. Perhaps business just isn't for me. I sure seem to be awfully clumsy at it. However, I'm laid-back enough and have life in enough perspective to laugh about this. After all, it's just an email, he's just a man, and it's just a company. It's nothing in the big scheme of things. But at the moment there's a dark sense of my idiocy that is hanging in the back of my mind and the constant wondering whether that email is going to get read or not and, if so, whether it will bring anything about.