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Whatever it was, it seems to have passed like a 24-hour stomach bug, and GMail, at least from this office, is working again. But GMail was, most definitely and desperately, broken, longer for some than others, curses raining down with all the pulled-out hair.

It righted itself just as I finished perusing all the Google Groups discussion forums and blogs and was about to contact Google to see what was up, even if I knew I'd get the same automated message the rest of the world – from Omaha to Japan – was getting for the past twelve hours:

We are aware of the issues a small sub-set of our users are experiencing when logging in and sending messages. Rest assured that our engineering team is working diligently to resolve these errors. We appreciate your patience…

Thanks,

Gmail Guide

Previously, when all was not right with the world, I tried to delete the most persistent of spam messages that had made it through all of my and Google's spam filters, only to be greeted with a 767 Error Code that took too long to come up in the first place.

I mused about how that code should be reserved for air traffic controllers for a minute and then tried to email somebody. That didn't work either. Let the cursing begin.

And then I remembered, from just a couple of hours earlier, David Utter asking us, "anybody else having trouble sending from GMail?" I quietly snickered, told him I was blissfully not having any trouble whatsoever and went back into a keystroke daze, annoying you fine people with completely unnecessary prose. Utter and Hemmingway be damned for their terseness.

But now, here I am singing the GMail blues rather upset that I may have to resort to actually using Outlook. Outlook! That's where I keep most of my spam and the thought of waiting for it to load, appear, and bring the year-and-a-half's worth of junk I've been singingly ignoring, was nothing short of a chicken chunk lodged in my windpipe.

There was a mild comfort in reading the plight of other GMail users, I discovered, like watching Jerry Springer and thanking God that wretchedness didn't come from my house. Some of them had been out of GMail luck for half a day, pinning their mission criticals, their homework, their archived reminders, all on the dependability of their favorite email interface. And there's just nothing. 

I went on for quite some time cataloguing their complaints, their pleadings, their conspiracy theories about Google unsubtly, slimily, and evilly trying to up-sell users to the paid, and guaranteed, subscription GMail recently released, and prepared to write one helluva nasty and pointedly dejected article about the cold, apathetic brokenness of GMail.

I decided to test it again as I expounded about how language was a set of arbitrary symbols that people agreed to give meaning to, and therefore, as a result, cursing is a meaningless concept. Poor Joe Lewis, who sits just two desks down the wall from me, received the most vulgar Emminem-inspired email (it goes like this: ****, ****, ***, *****, ****, shoobeedee-doo-wop, sincerely, Jake), just 12 minutes after I sent it. Guess I should have written it down and walked it over instead.

But all of this drama brought to mind a very important message you have suffered this far to receive. If the world is going to fully accept Web-based applications like Google wants it to, it had better damn well be reliable, working all the time just like it does on our offline desktops.

So there. GMail's fixed as far as I know, and life can go back to normal.

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