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Notes from the mail spool:A collection of weird and incomprehensible e-mail. |
It is an inexplicable phenomenon: people send me mail. They send me
mail for all kinds of reasons, some of which I cannot even begin to
fathom. Ever since I started maintaining the alt.tv.er Web site, I've been
getting even more of this weird e-mail than before. It's not the
"you're doing a great job, keep it up" stuff that bugs me, and it's
not even the complaints ("You screwed up on the background for one of
your pages" and "What are you trying to say? You contradicted yourself
twice!") that annoy me. I like the complaints. I like the praise
more. It's the e-mail from the truly, terminally clueless - the people
who can't read and figure things out for themselves - that really
bother me.
I first got the feeling something was amiss when I got my first "Dear Sarah" letter. It was early 1997, fumbling.com had just gone live, and there was still a large Sarah McLachlan site on here. The combination of the site and the domain name probably lead a few people to believe there was a connection between the artist and me, and so I'd get mail for Ms. McLachlan. Not a lot of it, mind you, but enough to make me worry about people. This e-mail was usually very soulful, very personal, and it made me feel just a bit guilty reading it. But it showed up in my mailbox, usually without a particularly descriptive subject line, and I needed to make sure it was what I thought it was before sending a reply back to the person who was, I'm sure, disappointed. Around this time, I got a very bizarre piece of mail from someone who had voluntarily subscribed to a mailing list I ran.
No big deal, I thought. Randomness. Then I took over the ER site. Boy, was I in for a shock.
Apparently, the comments page is confusing to some people. There's a bunch of boilerplate there now that seems to have warded off the more intelligent of these folks, but before it was just a form. I'd get piles of e-mail complaining about something that happened on the show. I'd get people who were tring to pitch story ideas, people who wanted to be on the show, people who wanted to talk to their favourite characters. (Yes, characters - not actors.) Even with the warnings and pointers, people are still sending me stuff. So I figured I'd have a little fun with their mail. The harmless ones have been anonymized for privacy reasons, but the truly clueless and the spectacularily annoying ones are reposted in their full glory.
NOTE: Before you send me mail expressing your outrage that I
would post private communication on the Web, please be advised that
I'll make an example out of you. If you discover your e-mail has been
included on this page and you would like it removed, you can send more
mail to supplicants@fumbling.com
and ask to have it taken down, with an appropriate amount of
grovelling. You need to demonstrate that you've gained a clue or four
between the time you sent the mail and now. Really good grovels will
get their mail removed; in its place will go the removal request.
This is an ongoing project, as you might imagine. I'll stop when the idiots stop sending me e-mail. Check back frequently for the latest fun from the mailbox.