reesesWeb

My nom de guerre is a common one, so I have a reasonable degree of google-cloaking for some of the dumber things I did in my youth. One of the people sharing my name is involved in public aspects of the Better Business Bureau and another was a drummer who achieved a notable amount of fame in certain circles in the 50s (and later), and if you're a drummer who cares about his craft, you would recognize the name. A tape or album of his is usually thrown in the back in movies about drummers to spackle on the verisimilitude, so I could probably collect feature film frame captures with my name boldly written across the screen.

If you go to the domain I have registered with my public name, you'll see that I just have a simple page with email, Skype id, Yahoo! id, and Google Talk id. Before you think to ask, I don't have my surname domain anymore because it was worth more to someone else than it was to me back in the mid-90s.

Regardless, I do not claim to be anyone on that page, and so it surprised me when I received the following email, which I took to be spam.

From: [deleted]@phatfoot.com
Subject: PHAFOOT PRESS RELEASE
Date: May 28, 2006 11:08:26 PM PDT
To: [dont@cross.the.streams]

Please see attached Press release,

We would like to give a Phatfoot drum harness to you and offer Phatfoot info and give aways at your upcoming clinics.

Please let me know what we need to do in order to make this happen.

Thank you,

[deleted]
Drayton Productions Inc.
Makers of PHATFOOT
P. O. Box 93764
Pasadena, CA 91109
(866) 742-8767
(626) 578-9963 fax
www.phatfoot.com

It took me about thirty seconds to figure out why I received this email. There was a Word document attached, but thinking that it was viral, I didn't open it.

I looked at their product, and that's when it occurred to me that this couldn't be spam. It would a) be cost-prohibitive to spend whatever it costs to run out a load of spam (a few thousand dollars, I suppose) that could evade a well-trained set of spam filters and scripts, and b) seemed to be written under a certain very specific misapprehension. Spam often does this ("Bob, you need to see this link!" or "Here's the information on v1 agr@ you requested.") but again, the goal in those cases is to give the person reason to believe that it _might_ apply to them.

Politeness dictated that I not create the impression that this other fine fellow was a rude guy who didn't answer email, so I replied.

From: [dont@cross.the.streams]
Subject: Re: PHAFOOT PRESS RELEASE
Date: May 28, 2006 11:39:56 PM PDT
To: [deleted]@phatfoot.com

[deleted],

I'm sorry to inform you that the [name] to whom you think you wrote this message passed away over ten years ago. I am assuming you think this is the email address is for the drummer who formed the Wailers and played with Miles Davis, Coltrane, and Monk. It is quite a common name, unfortunately, so there is bound to be some confusion.

-a.

Note that I point out that the person I think she is writing to has been dead for over a decade. Whose primary and most brilliant fame came in the fifties, who in the best case would be a hopefully vibrant 80+ years old.

While one sends offers of free loot expecting to hear "ya, gimme now," isn't "upcoming clinics" a little optimistic in this context? The smartass in me was tempted to reply with,"What do you need to do to make this happen? First, I could use a very strong cup of coffee."

Edit: I just noticed she misspelled the name of her product in the Subject line, as well. Oops!

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