Modern communication

I’m sitting at the coffee shop and my companion sends me an e-mail.
The e-mail goes through the wireless,
and arrives at the inbound GMail servers,
and a notification is queued to be sent to my phone and my web browser,
and the notification for my phone goes out over the T-Mobile 3G airwaves,
and arrives at my phone, who processes it and make a “you have a new e-mail” beep,
and then I look at my browser, which hasn’t updated yet,
and I click refresh which talks to the GMail web interface servers,
and I see the message, and click on it,
which goes through the coffee shop wireless, to the GMail storage servers, and retrieves the message,
and the message says something like “are you ready to leave yet?”

And I chuckle at the vast amount of resources that we’ve used to communicate something so simple and so primitive. Is this what’s right, or what’s wrong with the world?