I recently had an email from someone I don’t know, let’s call him Tom.
The email said:
“
We eagerly await the arrival of you and your family on Thursday. Donna has expressed a concern about the safety of our pet chipmunks with Sadie here. What do you think?
I don’t know what her hunting pattern is like.
“
It’s all to do with the wrong email address…
I too am worried about Sadie and the Chipmunks, for one I don’t know what type of animal Sadie is? Wolf? Dog? Goat? Who knows!? And as they sent the email to the wrong Mike, how will they know if they should be worried or not?
Well this got me thinking about how important it is to make sure you know what someone’s email address actually is (and knowing your own email address for that matter). I have had emails from all sorts of people thinking I am a different Mike, for example:
- An email about “our wedding plans”, will details of venue, invited guests and I seem to remember a note about someone they were NOT inviting! The email was meant for her husband to be, also called Mike Lowden. I later got sent pics of their beach wedding, it looked amazing.
- Another Mike Lowden emailed me about a Netflix account which was opened with his email address, which means he could login and watch Netflix for free! He thought it was my account, but it wasn’t.
- A reply to Noah’s birthday invite from someone called Chloe?! I don’t know a Noah or a Chloe, so I can only assume she turned up and he didn’t know she was coming?
- And another (different) birthday invite reply saying “Emily’s Mom is 100% down w the sleep over bday party. I just texted your home phone like a dork”
- A Fantasy Hockey team spreadsheet with instructions on how to pick a team
- And not forgetting the time I got an email about “xylanase thermal mutants” which you can read more about here. [Update I never heard back from them, which was sad.]
So there you have it, a brief history of people mistaking me for other people
Have you had anything similar happen?
Happy weekend
Mike
P.S. This was not an excuse to use the awesome Chipmunk graphic, honest!
October 3, 2016 at 9:09 pm
What is Microsoft Push Notification Service as occasionally I get pop up messages saying I may need to restart my computer? As I don’t think I use it I would like to prevent these messages from appearing.
October 4, 2016 at 10:26 am
Hi David
Do you mean the Windows side bar alerts? which looks like this http://www.pcinnercircle.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/right-hand-alerts.png ?
Or is it something different?
Quite often Windows Updates will popup an alert saying you need to restart your computer, and in Windows 10 it will schedule a restart “out of hours”.
If you can take a screen shot of the alert if it is different to the one I included that would be fantastic, full details can be found on the Send a Screen Shot page along the top menu of this site.
Let me know
Many thanks
Mike
August 18, 2016 at 2:12 pm
Love your sense of humour Mike!
Jeanne
August 18, 2016 at 2:56 pm
Ahh glad you liked my post Jeanne. I was worried about this one so got Tim to have a read first.
It just amazes me how much email I have had addressed to the wrong Mike!
Thank you
🙂