There but for the grace of God go . . . well, really almost any of us.
Ha! At a former job, we had a woman whose daughter was there as a summer intern. One day, the entire company got an email that began "I think I'm finally getting the hang of this stupid email program." She then went on to complain mightily about her "asshole" boyfriend who she apparently had just busted for cheating on her.
I've never done anything quite that bad.
I accidentally xent an e-mail to the wrong person. The person I wanted to reach had an "@juno.com" address, and I accidentally typed "@gmail.com"
Most of it wasn't too personal. I just described an interview I'd been on. I got an e-mail back saying, "I think you meant to send this to someone slse."
My e-mail could have had sensitive personal information in it, because I was going through a rough time, but, luckily, it didn't.
It can happen with phones too... When I was a kid my mother got a call from a girl, asking about me, by name.
Mum said that I had gone to sports training and the girl was suprised because she though my training was at another evening. She than asked how my father was.
My mother, slightly suprised, answered that he was dead (died a few years before). The girl blurted out, totally suprised.... "but yesterday he only had a slight case of the flue!".
She'd dialed the wrong number...
Apparently there's a professor of if I remember correctly theater at some university somewhere in the northern United States (Pennsylvania? I can't remember now and can't seem to find it easily on google) who has the same name as me.
A few years ago while I was living in NYC I received an e-mail intended for him from a female student of his containing a pretty thinly veiled offer of sex for a better grade, something like "Sorry I've been absent so many times this semester. Is there anything I can do to bring up my grade this late in the semester? I really need a good grade and I'm willing to do anything".
I was pretty conflicted about whether to just ignore it or to let her know she had sent it to the wrong M/tch. I don't think Randy Cohen was around at the time to offer me any guidance either.
I did end up letting her know (in fact I think I googled and found the right guy and suggested that he was the person she should talk to) and she sent back an embarrassed thank you to me.
Did I act wrongly?
Did I act wrongly?
Insofar as you didn't save the e-mail to share with us today, yes.
You mean the e-mail address, or the text of the e-mail itself?
The e-mail message itself. The e-mail address is a dream too far.
On a track and field mailing list I was on years ago a guy sent an e-mail to his friend - so he thought - talking about how the sex he had with some woman during lunch was so hot that he was too worn out to have sex with his girlfriend that night.
You should have promised to put her in touch with the real M/tch if she had sex with you.
I live with my sister now, and if people want the thread to go that way (misdirected emails are more fun I know) I am willing to report that, despite the fact that we didn't see each other for a 20-year period awhile back and are furthermore very different, it's a lot easier than any relationship I've ever been in.
Some say romance and desire make things easier, but what I think they do is make you stay with someone you can't stand until you are ready to explode. (You never hear anyone say "I killed her because I liked her" -- only true love can cause you to hack someone 57 times with a machete).
only true love can cause you to hack someone 57 times with a machete
Is that from Hallmark?
So "True Love Waits" is actually an anti-crime slogan?
only true love can cause you to hack someone 57 times with a machete
It is reassuring to know that the feelings I evoked in both my former wives and my current wife are based on their apparently quite intense and true love for me.
My sister is a good old girl. She's seen much, much worse than me.
I used to get misdirected emails for a guy who worked in payroll at the university I attended. His name was the same as mine, and the department listed my email address as his on their webpage. I would always reply with something along the lines of, "By the time you see this 'out of office' message, I'll be halfway to Brazil and traveling under a false identity I've assembled over the course of the last several years. Please tell Carol and the kids they drove me to this. Maybe one day I'll see them again, but they won't know me. The doctors will make sure of that."
So is this the criminal, or a different guy?
Different guy. I have an extremely generic name. Like, man, my parents really were not trying.
In fact, I used to belong to a mailing list just for guys with my name. One of the members started it as part of an art project he was doing. He collected little mini-bios and interview snippets and snapshots of traffic from the list and things like that and then put together an installation about the diversity of people with my extremely common name. It was odd.
The sex emails really liven up the job of the lawyer who has to spend days or weeks searching complete email archives to find the ones that are relevant to the litigation. Pee emails, not so much.
17, 18: Interesting. I'm in essentially the opposite position. It must suck to get confused with other people all the time.
I once experienced a writer -- a reasonably well-known fantasy genre writer, that is, though likely you've never heard of him -- whose books I had worked on, whom up to that point had always been very nice to me to my face, whom I had therefore thought was a casual friend, thinking he had hit "e-mail" in response to a Usenet post, but hitting "post" instead, and thus posting an intended e-mail to that Usenet newsgroup all about what a horrible person I was and how he'd always despised me, etc., etc. Oops.
I was glad to know, shocked as I momentarily was. Never been very fond of hypocrits.
Though that also brings to mind the Reasonably Well-Known Sf Writer who sucked up to me a lot so long as I was employed by her publisher and in a position to have an effect on her books, whom I was walking down a hallway with at a convention not long after I left that job, and she was chatting away with me, and I mentioned that I was no longer working for the publisher, and she immediately (within about 30 seconds) broke off the conversation, and I never heard from her again.
Fortunately, these are the only two such episodes in my life that ever occurred. They don't surprise me; it's not as if I'm not somewhat cynical in the first place.
It's entirely possible that at some point I've sent an e-mail to the wrong person, but if so it was so unembarrassing that I have no memory of it.
"The sex emails really liven up the job of the lawyer who has to spend days or weeks searching complete email archives to find the ones that are relevant to the litigation."
Speaking of which, see addendum here. (You've likely seen the main story by now.)
"Never been very fond of hypocrits."
Or even hypocrites. I think the other may have something to do with drawing blood, perhaps.
The sex emails really liven up the job of the lawyer who has to spend days or weeks searching complete email archives to find the ones that are relevant to the litigation. Pee emails, not so much.
Lizzie Borden took a machete
And hacked her mother 57 times
No, I'm just not feeling it.
17, 18: Wow, I had no idea "Robust" was that common a first name amongst clan McManlyPants.
Some say romance and desire make things easier, but what I think they do is make you stay with someone you can't stand until you are ready to explode.
I'd pay good money for a published collection of John Emerson's aphorisms. He's like Jack Handey, but better.
18 - Robust McManlyPants is Dave Gorman!
I used to know a Dave Gorman, actually; but a different one.
I seem to get a lot of misdirected email intended for a person with my name who either:
1) is trying to set up DSL service with Verizon in Los Angeles,
2) has several books on hold at the North Vancouver Public Library, or
3) has a set of paternal grandparents who just drove across the country.
3 was easy to set straight, and 2 is easy to ignore. 1 took the better part of a day of phone calls to set straight.
You will not be surprised to hear that I am just a little paranoid and suspicious about Robust McManlypants. Yeah, yeah, it ain't all about me and ideas of reference and all, but still...
I never have this problem, I'm not aware of anyone who shares my firstname/surname combination and everyone I've ever come across in real life who shares my surname has been related to me [although Google reveals others who are definitely not].
I did have a similar thing with an Internet pseudonym though. Years ago I had a pseudonym I used for blog comments*, my very first little Geocities website, and so on. It was a very obscure combination of words and yet I became aware after a while that if I 'googled' it -- this was probably pre-Google though -- that many or even most of the search results I found were not me. In a few cases this other person and I had commented on the same sites, even, which was a bit freaky. So, no more pseudonymity...
*although they wouldn't have been called 'blogs' at the time
There are a ton of people who share my name. Nothing like McManlyPants, but still a decent showing.
32: I presume "Matt" isn't as common a name in Scotland as it is here, then.
I Googled up every non-me John Emerson I could and put it on my "who" page. The most famous ones were Dred Scott's owner and the husband of the author of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes". There also were at least five individuals somehow involved in Asian affairs.
The only John Emerson I've ever met was a racially-mixed professional criminal who looked like Peter Lorre. When I was in HS there was a star athlete with my name not far away, but I never met him.
Emerson is a more common name than I originally thought, I think.
My father shares a first and last name with a guitar teacher and musician in NY, with a propensity for telling female fans who wanted to call him that he was listed in the phone book. Dad was, this guy wasn't. It didn't happen all that often -- maybe every six months or so -- but we'd get these calls from women looking for [Dad's name] and talking about how great the set he'd done in the bar last night was. They used to get pissy when we told them it was the wrong number.
(You'd think this would have caused a certain amount of embarrassment: luckilly the calls always seemed to refer to evenings when Dad had been home and clearly visible at all times. And he can't play the guitar.)
My premarital name was hyper-common; might as well have been Robusta McManlyPants. There was actually a long-running news story in the early 90s concerning a woman with my name, which wsa moderately disturbing. But I liked being electronically anonymous -- online searches would only find me buried in the midst of a heap of other Robusta's, so no one could possibly have figured out which information applied to me.
Then I hyphenated and I'm absolutely unique. Buck is related to everyone in the US with his last name, and there aren't many of them.
re: 34
No, it's not. Or at least it wasn't when I was younger. I was 16 before I met another person called Matthew. Seriously.
It's more that McGrattan isn't a common name at all, the 1998 census figures suggest something like 300 on the UK mainland and another 200 or so in Northern Ireland. So given the relative scarcity of Matthew in Scotland I'd be surprised if there were any.
This funky surname profile:
shows all the McGrattans in the 1888 census clustered round Glasgow and the picture in the 1998 census hasn't really changed much.
[This has probably been too much information!]
Wow, I had no idea "Robust" was that common a first name amongst clan McManlyPants.
Ach, lad, we be a secretive boonch. (As an aside, I hear Tia knows a guy who can read that in the proper accent. Just an FYI.)
LB, I'm feeling that. If you google my name, even my full name, even with quotes around it, I am way, way down in there somewhere, but I'm nothing even like a first hit, or anywhere in the first few pages.
A friend of mine was once reading a book called The New Victorians, which featured several quotes by someone with my name, who was described as being my age, and living in New York--and they sounded vaguely like things I might say. Also, someone else from my college class was quoted extensively in the book, making me think I'd been interviewed and somehow forgotten about it, or perhaps that the quotes were taken from papers I'd written in a feminist theory class. I had to actually call my college friend Sara to ask what circumstances she'd been interviewed in, to determine that the quotes were not from me, but from some other ac.
I confirmed at some other point, later, through googling, that there was another ac who participated in the book. She shops at Origins and they always pull her up in the database when I'm buying stuff from them, and ask me if I live in Brooklyn Heights.
they always pull her up in the database when I'm buying stuff from them, and ask me if I live in Brooklyn Heights.
Now, that would freak me out a little. The whole deal with the quotes, and then to be continually mistaken for her in a store? That would wig me pretty hard, and I'm not sure why.
The freaky thing was that my college friend was involved in the book. That's what made me question my own memory of having participated in an interview.
The Origins thing doesn't seem so weird, except as a reminder of the previous freakiness.
AC, just stick that memory in your "Borges / Poe / Kafka" pigeonhole and move on. No problem.....
Unless there's a mysterious murder in Brooklyn Heights, and suddenly you hear a knock at the door. Not the police, but..... who?
The Brooklyn Victorian Murders, coming soon at your favorite bookstore.
I'm nothing even like a first hit
The index page of apostropher.com is the second hit for my name, even though it only appears on the About page.
I'm startled to add Apostropher's other name to the names of You Guys that I know. He's not a "R**s," he's "Apostropher"!
A few years ago I got an e-mail for a different Gary Farber, but in over 11 years online, it's only happened a couple of times, and not for a few years.
If you Google "gary farber," just about all of the hits are for me, save for the SunTrust Robinson Humphrey guy and the IMDB listing. Since it claims there are "524,000 English pages," that's a bit frightening, but on the other hand, it only shows 50 without "similar results," so I'm not sure what to make of that (they can't all be archive pages, though, and I certainly know there should be thousands of genuine hits on the web (not counting the 32,100 on Usenet). When I sample the uncut version, they still all seem to be me, though also most are my own blog ad infinitum.
When checking just "farber" on Google on the web, I rise and and fall at times in priority, but am always on the top page; currently #5; I've been #1 at times, but it's a fight between me and the Dana Farber Cancer Center; plus another 3 guys now. Similarly, I've been the #1 "Gary" in the past, but no more; now I'm ignominously not even on the front page, but only #5 on the second page. Damn you, Gary, Indiana! I used to be more important than your entire town!
Still, I'm not hard to find.
My first and last names happen to form a bizarre French phrase.
Hey L., were you involved in this?
As I've mentioned before, I'm the only google result for my name. I just tried it again and only got ten results; I don't know quite what to make of that.
I just tried it again and only got ten results
Were they other than for you? If so, just think of yourself as a trend setter. If they're all you, just think of yourself as too cool to be imitated. At least, this is exactly what I would do.
All for me. If you follow the link, you'll see I got eleven results in January. It's the decrease that's puzzling.
There are over 10,000,000 google results for my real first and last name, over 15,000 if you put it in quotes, and still nearly 1000 if I put my middle initial into the phrase. I don't even know where I am in those results; I don't think I'm on any of the higher ranked pages.
My middle name, on the other hand, is completely unique and returns 2 results from only one domain.
I realize no one else gives a damn, and rightly so -- but, hey, it's the current topic. I am utterly boring otherwise. I retreat, bowing.
In those days, though, I only was available via archive. Time travel! Return to yesteryear on the internets, if you can stand it!
I still like some of those posts, such as the one immediately below about:
Brian Smith and scientists at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada have discovered that intelligent rats who learned to navigate a maze easily also developed into heavy drinkers.Because, who wouldn't?
My archives are the gifts that ever give! They continue to reveal whenever I've been an idiot! Mock me! Mock me noooowwwwww!
Also, I try my best to never use my middle name, because it is just so pointless and boring.
Googling with my middle initial I get two results; with my full middle name, one. All, of course, are me.
I tend not to use my middle name except when full full names are called for on forms; the online results are from official-type records, so to speak.
Here's a pointless question which almost certainly has no correct answer, and which I was nevertheless bothered by two days ago: What are the truth conditions for "X is hidden"?
I think one of the conditions has to be that some person intended to place x somewhere where that person thought others would be less likely to find it than they would be if x were placed wherever it normally is.
What I'm not sure about is whether or not that's both necessary and sufficient.
56: Yeah, me too.
57: The condition you give seems sufficient to me; the human action part of it may not be necessary given metaphorical uses.
I try my best to never use my middle name
I go by my middle name. My first name is Robert. Oddly, my great-grandfather was Andrew Joseph and went by Joe, my grandfather is Joseph Robert and goes by Bob; my father was Robert Stephen and went by Steve. I decided to break the pattern with my boys because, really, it's kind of a pain in the ass.
Just so there's no confusion, I am not this Robert R. Barnes.
My last name is pretty unusual in America, so for a while I was one of the few people who came up in a google search. If you look for my first and last name together, all of the hits refer to me--though the rankings have changed.
58: I think the metaphorical uses aren't really making truth-functional assertions, so I don't worry about having truth condtions for them.
Given that there almost a million hits, is "Bye-laws" really an acceptable variant?
So who says metaphors aren't true or false?
Don't make me come back there, w/d.
If I were to say, "Pay careful attention to these directions, my house is pretty hidden," is the "my house is pretty hidden" part capable of evaluation?
62 -- the OED has its entry titled "BY-LAW, BYE-LAW". First usage with the by- spelling is from 1622, first with the bye- spelling is 1732. It does not indicate that buy-law is an acceptable variant although this has been popular in the US legislature of late.
If your house is in plain view, your house is not pretty hidden. If your house when masked by other objects is unsightly, your house is not pretty hidden. If it's easy to figure out how to get to your house when you've got a decent idea where you're going, your house is not pretty hidden. If your house is in fact extremely well hidden, your house is not pretty hidden.
66 -- I would take that to mean your house looks better when it is hidden. I think the meaning you are going for would be better expressed as, "my house is pretty well hidden."
I should have said in 61, "I don't think the 'metaphorical' uses are referring to the same concept, and therefore if they do have truth conditions, they wouldn't be the same ones." I know that's totally different then what I did say, but hey.
68: Nah. Consider, "I'm pretty beat," and "That's pretty big."
So agency is the basis for the distinction between metaphorical and non-metaphorical usages?
69 (tee-hee): "numbering" s/b "numberless"
71: I knew I was about to be asked that, but the answer is just that using hidden to just mean "hard to find" seems to be talking about something different than the standard use of hidden. Also, I wouldn't have used the word metaphorical in the first instance (but teofilo used it and wasn't that bad), I probably would have said "figurative."
I don't think 74 is an insult, but just in case: Your mother.
It wasn't, but just in case: Aren't "figurative" and "metaphorical" basically the same thing?
How does one pronounce "teofilo"? tay-AH-fill-oh or TAY-oh-FEE-loh?
(If one is looking for a pronunciation other than "Ted", that is.)
I think that link was supposed to go here.
80 - Actually, here.
(Because. And. And. Explanation.)
78: The latter. Although the proper Spanish pronunciation, which I discovered after I began using it as a pseudonym, is apparently tay-OH-fee-loh (spelled Teófilo).
Someone with my exact name (first, last, and middle) was the first person to electrocute himself by urinating on the third rail of the new york subway.
83 -- that's a lovely name. Wear it with pride.
I was cruising along nicely, usually atop the Google rankings for my name, when another one got a job at Google Itself. Guess who now occupies the first seven positions?
The fix is in.