Drinking and e-mailing? Google to the rescue

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As the pink slips start appearing on workers’ desks, many of us are likely to stomp home and mix ourselves something good and stiff from the part of the liquor cabinet that normally gathers dust. On our third whiskey sour, the probability of snapping open our laptops and firing off a pissed-off e-mail to our bosses goes up about threefold. EWI—e-mailing while inebriated—is not a crime, but it should be, seeing as a message crafted when you’re so drunk you’re drooling can murder your career.

Thank Buddha for Google. From the official Gmail blog in October:

Gmail can’t always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we’re launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help. When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?

Here’s what it looks like:

mail_goggles1

Brilliant. Now hand me the JD.