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.

Enough already! Show me the mail!

• "I have a social agenda!"

  I guess that since ER is "big-time television" (whatever that's supposed to mean), everyone with a cause or an axe to grind figures they're entitled to some kind of air time. If I get as many of these as I do, I'd hate to think what the poor folks at Warner Bros. or NBC get.
  • My favourite. This person was so phenomenally dumb that it literally blew my mind. Be sure to read the part where I am described as the "nastiest person ever."
  • The dangers of cochlear implants.
  • Psychiatry is EVIL!.

• "I am a clueless twit!"

  Your mother (and third-grade teacher) lied to you. There is too such a thing as a dumb quesiton. I get them all the time. This would also be the "I am a big fan but don't know anything" section of the archives.
  • The biggest clueless twit I ever ran into was some flaming loser from the UK who had the audacity to play the "I'm smarter than you" card while demonstrating an alarming inability to read, write, or distinguish between commonly used homophones. I'd say I had fun, but this was a thoroughly depressing experience leading me to wonder: "Are there really people THIS STUPID in Britain?"
  • George Clooney's departure, Part I
  • My friend Sean being a smartass
  • Stating the obvious
  • "I can't watch `Days of our Lives'!"
  • George Clooney's departure, Part II
  • Noah Wyle's facial hair
  • Where, exactly, did you think you were?
  • Someone who couldn't watch the opening credits
  • Obscure questions, Part I
  • I must be a mind reader...
  • Noah Wyle's facial hair, revisited
  • Oh, like I get to pick the actors...
  • And by the way, your father smelt of elderberries!
  • Loose poultry, Part I
  • Cross-over stupidity, Part I

• "Please link your site to mine!"

  I installed a link manager specificall so I could avoid having to deal with stuff like this. Despite that, many people still want me to link to them, under the theory that they'll link back to me and provide me with traffic. Unfortunately, this ignores two basic points. First, I don't care how much traffic my site gets. The people who want to visit it will come regardless of the number of places I'm linked from. Second, and this is far more important - how much commonality does the alt.tv.er Web site have with a car seat manufacturer?
  • "I'm doing a contest.."

• Unreasonable Requests

  • Do I look like a press agent?
  • The Obscure Questions Department

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.

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