Yesterday I explained my students that you should never put too much personal information in a formal or semi-formal email. After all, you never know who will read it. And when people are working, they are really not interested in hearing everything about your trials and tribulations anyway. Although personally I would warmly welcome a bit of a human touch to invoices, requests for information and other boring mail if I were an office clerk. That’s probably also the reason why I would be a very bad one….

Before I knew it, we were talking about how you can express anger, frustration or love in a formal way. The importance of finding ways on how to stay polite and calm while telling people effectively what’s bothering you. I truly enjoyed this civilized conversation with these 18-year olds about matters of the heart. Especially after all the outbursts of f… y… and remarks about oral sex and penis sizes in the other class the day before.

“It’s a pity you cannot perfume your emails”, said one student. And then, I thought of an other wonderful invention. Wouldn’t it be great to have some sort of machine that made it possible to send smells to each other! Something like a printer, but then with smell cartridges. Of course, a colour is only made of three components and smells of many more, but I’m sure some smart chemist would be able to develop something alike.

The conversation continued. We talked about how the perfume industry could benefit from such a gadget, that it would be a great way to advertise on the internet. And how lovely it would be to open an email from your loved one that smelled like roses…:)

But I should have known: One student farted really loud, with the remark that there should be ways to zip that in a file as well. And then they started talking about sending rotten egg smells, manure, etc, etc…

Of course, being a very strict teacher, I nipped this sudden turn in our talks in the bud, and put them straight to work on writing a formal email. I still think it is a great idea though!