Monday, June 04, 2007

Monday Morons--Get your own damned email account

My club has a website and a list serve and all that stuff. I don't care about the technical stuff. I don't know how a thing works, and I don't care how a thing works, just as long as it keeps working. So we have this email thing, and if we find something interesting we can email everyone in the group who has requested the service. For some reason, the person sending the original email ends up getting two copies of the email. I don't know why that happens or care why that happens, I have just noticed that it does happen.

Anyway, as I have mentioned recently, some friends of mine are going to help out at the Dallas Symphony this week, so there has been a lot of emails on the list serve. So usually when I check my email, there's something new about it. And there was an email from a J*** B*********. I don't know a J*** B********, and I don't think I've ever heard of a J*** B********, but that's okay. I don't know every single person on the list serve. Some people on the list serve joined the club and then moved away before I was I member, but they keep in touch with other members. Or sometimes there's a new person I haven't met. Or sometimes someone who isn't in our little group puts something on the list serve about an upcoming event.

The message from J*** B******** is a reply to an earlier email about the Star Trek Dallas Symphony thing, and I've been trying to keep up with it even if I'm not really planning to go. So I open the email, and it says "Please remove me from your list serve." So that was kind of funny. You would think that he wouldn't be on the list serve in the first place if he didn't want to be. And you'd think that he'd know who to contact about getting removed from the list if he changed his mind and didn't want it anymore. But instead there's just this message to the group at large that says "Please remove me from your list serve."

Anyway, I'm looking at the address that the guy is using. J***B@ (company name).com. Now, for about fifteen years, a certain J*** B***** has been a member of our little group. They have the same first name, and different last names that begin with the same letter. And our J*** B***** used to work for the same company, but he had to give that up two years ago due to some health problems. But I'm pretty sure that J*** B@ (company name).com was his email, and he's the one who put it on the list serve.

I've never heard of this happening before with an email, but I'm certain that it happens all the time with phone numbers. After you haven't been using the number for a while, the phone company gives the number to a new customer. And you occasionally get phone calls from people looking for the person who used to have the number before you. It happens once in a while, and you're stuck with it.

But for the most part, we don't choose our phone numbers. For the most part, we do make up our own email addresses. He should probably drop this one and maybe try J B********@ (company name).com. He must be getting tons of stuff meant for J*** B*****, and most of it is not as nice as our emails about the Dallas Symphony.

In the mean time he keeps sending the message "Please remove me from your list serve" in reply to every email any of us sends out. So then he's getting two copies of his message in addition to the original message he replied to. We all got a message reminding us that we can't be removed from the list serve that way.

I just felt like sending him a message that if he didn't want to be on the list serve he shouldn't be using someone else's email address. I guess I'm not in a good mood.

3 comments:

Rachel said...

Sometimes stuff like that happens and it can be a nightmare for the person that ends up with all of the unwanted email. The old J*** B******* could have had tons of stuff being sent to that address and the new guy now has to wade through it all.
At least he sent a polite email. I have seen some people send the nastiest emails when they receive something that they don't want.

laughing said...

I'm sure the old J*** B***** had a lot of stuff sent there, and probably not nice stuff. The new guy should have noticed and changed the email to use his last name instead of just the B. If it were me, I'd have changed it the first day. This stuff probably wasn't a problem when the old guy got the email, but this is a big company now, and you can't just use something like J***B@ (company name).com, and not expect problems. If you think about it there could be like 1% of the company with that first name and a last name that starts with B. You have a lot less trouble using your last name, unless maybe your name is J. Smith, and then you have to do something like J. Smith #451. Fifteen years ago, it was a smaller company, and everyone probably knew who JB in Dallas was, but there must be hundreds of JBs in the company now.

dmarks said...

I have an old friend who for years used AOL. I had not contacted him for a year or two at one point, and I sent him an email. It turned out that the friend had cancelled his AOL account, and there was an entirely new person who now had the same AOL email address as my friend.