Ok, this is a little complicated, but I trust you Dopers to tell me true and help me navigate this awkward situation in which I now find myself.
Before I get into the actual situation at hand, you need to know a little background. Grab a cuppa and a warm blanket, because this is kind of a long story.
I have an ex-friend whom I’ll call Anne. Our friendship ended a few months ago. It was messy, it was mean and petty (on her part, not on mine), and the more she behaved like a child the happier I was that it was over. Anyway, there’s another message board that I’ll call XYZ that she and I both frequent on a regular basis.
On the XYZ board, there are two important options available when you send a private message. First, there’s the “keep a copy” option, which is not checked by default. So if I want to keep a record of a message I sent to someone, I have to actively check that little box. Secondly, there’s a preview option, which lets me preview the message before sending it. Preview is selected by default, so when I compose a message to someone and click “continue”, I’m sent to a preview pane to read over and edit the message as necessary. In order to actually send the message, I have to click “send” at the bottom of the preview pane. If I click “continue” again, it just refreshes the preview to reflect any changes I’ve made.
Got all that? Ok, cool. Now on to the story.
Last Monday Anne wrote something extremely snotty and totally wrong on the XYZ board about something I supposedly did to her just recently. She didn’t name names, but enough people on that board know the story between us that they could probably figure out who she was talking about. So even though I’ve been excellent at cutting all contact with her before now, I couldn’t let this one pass. I sent her a private message, told her that she was mistaken and explained exactly how in a firm but non-aggressive manner. She wrote back with a nasty diatribe, accusing me of all sorts of other things. Now up until this point I’ve taken the high road with her, because a) bitch crazy, which means b) there’s no winning an argument with this girl, no matter how much logic you have on your side, and c) bitch crazy. This time, though, I wrote her back with the gloves off. I wasn’t cruel, but I definitely stood up for myself and was more brusque than I’ve ever been before. It felt good, too, because I got a lot of things off my chest that I really needed to say to her, but didn’t have the chance until now because I had severed contact.
So today I was writing someone else a PM, and when I was looking at my inbox I noticed that the message I received on Monday from Anne did not have an “R” by it, which means that, according to the system, I never replied to her. I could have SWORN up and down that I did send it, because I was so damned proud of my rebuttal. But in checking my “sent items”, my reply was not there. This means that one of two things has happened.
First of all, it’s possible that I clicked “reply” to Anne’s message, wrote my bad-ass diatribe, clicked “continue” (which sent me to the preview pane), but then clicked away to some other part of the board before actually sending the message. Crazy as it sounds, I’ve done this before when replying to an actual thread (which has the same interface as the private messages). Not often, but I have done it. This would mean that Anne never got it.
The other possibility is that I wrote the reply to her as a new message (e.g. without clicking “reply”), and that I failed to check the box that keeps a copy of the message in my sent items. If this is the case, Anne did get it and has just not chosen to reply.
So now I’m faced with a dilemma: if I send the message again and she did get it back on Monday, I look like an moron who’s itching for a fight. But if I don’t send the message again and she didn’t get it on Monday I look like I’m slinking away again, which I am NOT doing, dammit. I have been far too kind to her throughout this whole thing, and it would damn nigh kill me to think that she thinks she somehow schooled me again. Eff that, as the kids would say.
Any suggestions you brilliant Dopers might have would be greatly appreciated.
P.S. I have already asked the XYZ board’s administrator and sadly there’s no way for her to determine that I sent a message, short of her logging into Anne’s account and checking her inbox, which I just won’t ask her to do.