I first got email in 1992.
I was an eighth grader and my dad was a college professor.
We shared one university email address.
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You might think the email address was his and I just used it.
But that’s not true.
In those days, colleges only gave professors and students an email account if they asked for one.
I asked my dad to ask.
He did—and the username he chose had both of our initials in it.
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This was the early internet.
There were no websites, for example.
I used my new email account to post messages in online newsgroups and to ask strangers for free software.
At some point, a couple of my friends got email, too.
Now we could email one another.
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Dad and I had a system so we knew whose personal messages were whose.
If someone was writing me, I told them to put my name in the message subject.
That’s it.
That was our system.
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I didn’t have sex when I was in high school.
I didn’t drink.
I didn’t do drugs.
One time, though, my friend Josh got access to a computer disk with pictures of naked ladies on it.
He emailed the pictures to me.
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My dad didn’t open the message.
It had my name on it.
But when he checked email on his office computer, it downloaded all the pictures.
Then it automatically opened them.
In seconds, pictures of naked ladies filled his screen.
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Dad wasn’t mad.
He didn’t panic.
He just closed the pictures and deleted them from his computer.
When he got home, he told me what happened and to tell Josh not to do that again.
Then he apologized for inadvertently invading my privacy.
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My senior year of high school I got really close to someone who would become my first girlfriend.
She had dial-up internet at home and we emailed one another almost every night.
These messages were long.
They were intimate.
We talked a lot about sex and drinking and drugs even if we weren’t doing them.
Neither of us thought twice about the fact I shared my email account with my dad.
And guess what?
As far as I know, he really didn’t read my messages.
I certainly never considered reading his.
The system worked!
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I left home for college.
I got my own email address.
My dad kept—and still has—the one with both of our initials.
Sometimes, when I get a message from him, I think about that for a split-second.
We shared an email address for four years and nothing terrible or even terribly embarrassing happened.
It’s good to know that that’s possible between two people.
It helps me believe the best of us all.