Desmond sent the email on a Tuesday afternoon, rescheduling Thursday's client call to Friday morning instead. He assumed, reasonably, that Bianca would see it before the week was over. What he didn't know was that Bianca's inbox had quietly routed the message into a folder she rarely checked.
德斯蒙德在一个周二的下午发出了那封邮件，把周四的客户电话会议改到了周五上午。他想当然地认为，比安卡在这一周结束之前会看到。他不知道的是，比安卡的邮箱悄悄把这封邮件分流到了一个她很少查看的文件夹里。
By Thursday at ten, Desmond was sitting alone in the conference room, waiting for a colleague who had no idea the meeting had moved. He sent a quick message: "Running a bit early, or are you on your way?" No reply came for almost twenty minutes.
到周四上午十点，德斯蒙德独自坐在会议室里，等着一位根本不知道会议已改期的同事。他发了一条短消息：“我来早了，还是你在路上？”将近二十分钟都没有回音。
Bianca, meanwhile, had left for the client's office as originally planned, expecting to meet Desmond there at eleven. When she arrived and found the office empty except for a confused receptionist, she felt her stomach drop slightly. She had missed something, though she couldn't yet tell what.
与此同时，比安卡已经按原计划动身去客户的办公室，打算十一点在那里和德斯蒙德会合。她到了之后，发现办公室里除了一位一脸困惑的前台，空无一人，顿时觉得心里一沉。她漏掉了什么，只是还说不清是什么。
It was Desmond who called Bianca. "Where are you?" he asked. "The call was moved to Friday, remember?"
是德斯蒙德给比安卡打了电话。“你在哪儿？”他问，“会议改到周五了，你不记得了吗？”
"I never saw that," Bianca said, checking her phone as they spoke. "When was it sent?"
“我根本没看到。”比安卡一边说，一边查看手机，“是什么时候发的？”
"Tuesday afternoon," Desmond told her. "I even copied your manager."
“周二下午。”德斯蒙德告诉她，“我还抄送了你的经理。”
Bianca scrolled through her main inbox first, then her folders. Eventually she found the message sitting unread in a promotions tab, buried under three days of newsletters. It had been sitting there, silently, since the moment it arrived.
比安卡先翻了主收件箱，又翻了各个文件夹。最后，她在促销标签页里找到了那封未读邮件，它埋在三天的新闻简报下面。自从收到的那一刻起，它就一直静静地躺在那里。
"I'm so sorry," she said. "I genuinely never saw this. My email must have filtered it automatically."
“真对不起，”她说，“我是真的没看到。我的邮箱肯定是自动把它过滤掉了。”
"That happens," Desmond said, and he meant it. He had lost messages to spam folders more than once himself, usually at the worst possible time. "Nobody's fault, really. Let's just figure out today."
“这种事常有。”德斯蒙德说，他是真心的。他自己也不止一次在垃圾邮件夹里丢过邮件，而且通常都是在最糟糕的时候。“真的没人有错。我们想想今天怎么办吧。”
They agreed to keep Friday's meeting as planned. The freed-up hour that afternoon would go toward something else entirely, a walk-through of the project timeline neither of them had gotten to yet. Bianca suggested they start using a shared calendar invite instead of relying on email alone.
他们商定周五的会议照旧。今天下午空出来的那一个小时，就拿来做点别的事——把项目时间表从头到尾过一遍，这件事两个人都还没顾得上。比安卡提议，以后改用共享日历邀请，不要只靠邮件。
"Good idea," Desmond said. "Emails get buried. Calendars are harder to miss."
“好主意。”德斯蒙德说，“邮件容易被埋掉，日历就没那么容易错过了。”
By the end of the day, the two of them had sorted the whole mix-up out. Bianca had already set up a recurring invite for future calls. She closed her laptop, relieved that a single missed message hadn't cost them anything more than an awkward hour.
到一天结束时，两个人已经把这场误会全部理清了。比安卡已经为以后的会议设好了循环邀请。她合上笔记本电脑，松了一口气：一封没看到的邮件，除了一个尴尬的小时之外，没有让他们付出更多代价。
