So not only has the Gumbaby blog started attracting its own clueless commenters (w00t! my fiendish plan is working), but I am no longer able to ignore an even more troubling bout of internet illiteracy: People have apparently started treating my gandrews email account at gmail as if it is their own. To date I have received:
- a request from Carole Wright to Garnett Andrews to put “Please pray that God will prepare me for….. Service, Cross-cultural sensitivity, Strength, Stamina, God to teach me, The team of workers, The students, Wayne to manage, Safety” on a prayer card with edelweiss on it;
- email from a Bertie Russell asking if Mr. Andrews wanted to buy particular “unmodernised” properties for development in London;
- a request to Giles Andrews that 78 Lewin Road have “External walls – 50mm celotex with 100mm internal block” so that it would be to spec for thermal performance;
- a reminder — breathlessly titled “Mr. Darcy Alert!” — that Pride and Prejudice is on tonight, apparently directed at someone at the University of Nevada, Reno;
- a query from Matthew Leipau, manager of the Longhorn Steakhouse in Jacksonville, FL, asking if Mark (?!) wanted to be in a foursome for the Justice Coalition golf tournament this year;
- a broadcast message from the Heron School in Sacramento advising signed-up parents that August 10th is the first day of school;
- email from Anthony P. Puisis, a professional recruiter (for how much longer?!) asking for Gary Andrews’s resume again so he could pass it along for a WAN engineering contractor position at Capital One in Hauppage, Long Island;
- messages to a Graham Andrews as part of a conversation from Ashok Sinha and Paul Pullinger having something to do with pipelines, pallet plants, mining diamonds in Namibia, and a bidding war;
- a prospectus about beginning teacher education from the University of Georgia, intended for Gayle Andrews (almost! That’s almost me! Nice try, Internet, next time maybe you’ll get the hang of this baffling digital-literacy thing);
- request to reset the password of the gandrews account so George Andrews (georgeandrews04@gmail.com) can use it;
- copies of George H. Andrews, Jr.’s tax returns from TurboTax;
- and this image, sent from Regina Janowski to Gered Andrews, who apparently needed to use it as a “category page” for an atavistically-designed, Angelfire-like webpage:
I am beginning to feel as if I might be crazy and some of these might be spam, but honestly, these did not act like spam conversations. They often ran as if I was being included in the middle of an ongoing discussion, where the people mailing had already agreed on certain terms in other email or phone conversations.
Today an email from Target.com showed up in my box. A woman named Gizelle, currently residing on in Miami (thanks to Yahoo directory assistance, I know the street she lives on), signed up her account with my email address. The email was to tell the owner of the gandrews account that her $50 order of kitchen supplies would soon be shipped. Now, of course, it also gave me a clue that an account with this address existed — and since I own the email address, changing her password and accessing the account would be trivial. From there, it would be a piece of cake to add new shipping addresses, use the credit card stored in the account, and order all sorts of new merchandise.
I’m not up for doing anything criminal, so I refrained, but for a while I seriously entertained the idea of redirecting the one existing order on the account to a different address where it would still get to Gizelle — her work address, for example, or that of a family member — but its redirection would confuse the hell out of her.
Who could I send it to? Well, unfortunately, Gizelle has absolutely zero hits for her full name on Google aside from this post (I am predicting, once the spiders find this page), so it was not going to be a cakewalk to take Steve Rambam’s paranoid lecture at HOPE, about people voluntarily divulging information on MySpace, and try to prove it right by having the package sent to one of the friends she listed there.
However, this was not the first time Gizelle had made use of my email address. She’s apparently been househunting recently. I’ve received email from two different realtors responding to her requests for more information about apartments (sent via comment form, where she filled in my email address). And the realtors of course have web pages with their addresses on them. So I could conceivably have redirected Gizelle’s package to one of them, with instructions to pass it on to her.
Ultimately, though, I couldn’t be sure that she was still in touch with the realtors, and I didn’t want to get in hot water. So I decided to look up absolutely everything I could about Gizelle, call her on one of the two phone numbers I now had for her, and deeply impress the danger of an error like this on her by scaring the shit out of her with what I knew about her.
I called the number Gizelle had provided to the realtor and got her sister, who sounded kind of blase about the whole affair even though I told her her sister’s credit rating was essentially at risk. Gizelle wasn’t home, so I left a message.
She just called me back. As it turns out, her address begins gandrewsr. It’s one character different. “I’ve been so stressed out lately,” she said, and apologized that sometimes she messed her address up. I told her I didn’t mind, but she really ought to be careful and check her spelling considering the consequences. We agreed that after her current order gets to her, I’ll delete the account.
There’s no failsafe remedy for a typo like that, aside from being super-careful. And these days cookies and passwords stored in our browsers do not encourage us to be super-careful when entering identifying information. Are George, Gayle, Gered, Giles, Mark, Garnett, Gary, and all the rest just mistyping their own email addresses? Are their friends and colleagues just guessing that because they’re gandrews@unr, they’re also @gmail?
Why don’t they just leave me out of their private affairs? I don’t like being the party who ignores an email about taxes or real estate and starts an international incident.
Methinks the deluge may warrant beginning a new blog.
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