Tag Archives: crossed internets

People still think they are me

Or am I actually the wrong person? I am not sure anymore. My secret disposable Gmail account keeps getting appropriated by others with similar names, and it’s like having a window into arcane and hideous secrets of existence. I live in my own head, first and foremost, and some of my scariest moments as a child involved seeing myself in a mirror and realizing “I am a person! I am three-dimensional! I am ME!” But in my old age, I have realized that it is far worse to be other people.

January 29
Heidi to Alan, Nina, Lisa, me, Eric, Maggie
not sure if you guys have seen this..but i love this audition. I’ve seen the video many times. haha…
the beginning part made me laugh so hard because Nick does that a lot also.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=HifybwoujTk

January 29
Y. Lisa to Heidi, Alan, Nina, me, Eric, Maggie
Hehe, Alan and I saw that last week on American Idol. They were awesome!

Which part exactly does Nick do all of the time? I’m curious….

January 29
Heidi to Lisa, Alan, Nina, me, Eric, Maggie
the “chicka bow wow” part.

It’s from axe deodorant comerical. Of course Nick doesn’t do it with such skill.

January 30
Y. Lisa to Heidi, Alan, Nina, me, Eric
Oh, haha…do you chime in with your “ow wow”? Hehe! A duet!

November 14, 2007
Hello [my first name],

I was talking with Louise the other day and she mentioned that you were curious about me and what I looked like.

Jody and I have a Wedding website you are more then welcome to check out. You probably haven’t seen Jody in a while either. We have our engagement photo on the site.

http://www.weddingbells.ca

If you can’t get it to work just let me know and I can email the photograph.

Take care,

Kate C–

P.S. Louise said she had told you I was of a German background. Actually, my Dad was in the military and I was born in Germany because he was posted there. My family name is actually Old English, the first part Cowper ( should be Cooper, the ancestors couldn’t spell) means a barrel maker and Waite means a clearing. We have done some genealogy and we can trace back 14 generations in England, which is kind of cool, though, both sides of my family have been in Canada for several generations.

September 26, 2007
Someone in Australia named Marena requested that someone named Janet forward this along to me!
FW: no 83 [I am itching to read numbers 1 through 82, let me assure you]

“….
While all this was happening Gordon was in South Africa. We always give him a list of stuff to buy there, and he is very good about it. So on 26 July he arrived back, armed with a suitcase filled with drugs: Sudafed, Codis, Bezerol, Rohypnol (stuff we can’t buy here), his own medication, and lots more. As he approached Quarantine he noticed a big sign: “Channel 7 is filming ‘Border Patrol’ today”. He almost had a heart attack – what if they find all those pills and he is filmed on national television for the whole world to see him as a drug dealer! Fortunately he seemed small fry and he shot through without a hitch.
….
We joined John and Carol for an evening of Peruvian singing by one of that country’s famous singers. Not my cup of tea. It was a long evening, everything in Spanish (she did not have one word of English) and the music was pretty much the same – uninteresting and loud. Pity to waste so much time and money and not enjoy the evening.
….
The Ski Saga

Before Gordon knew that he had to go to Chicago, we had planned a trip to the snow fields. (We haven’t been for a few years, due to knee ops and such.) We booked our usual Adaminaby cottage and to make it a bit more reasonable, we invited several people to join us. One after another they fell by the wayside, and then Gordon got summoned to Chicago. I was willing to cancel the whole trip but he insisted that I still went. In the end only John (40, unmarried) was still able and keen to go, and then I managed to cajole and bribe Maria and Eric to join us for the weekend. John and I were leaving on the Thursday and coming back the Monday. Then, the day before departure, the owners of the cottage phoned to say the sudden warm weather had the snow melting and did we still want to do it. I consulted John and my children and all of them said they’d still like to go, whether they ski or not. So the trip went ahead. I bought the food, packed the car, made the padkos, locked up the house and when John arrived we were on the road within five minutes. We had a few hitches along the road with wrong directions and ended up driving the last hour in the dark through a kangaroo infested national park on a dirt road. But we got there in the end, had our liquid refreshments and psyched ourselves up for the morrow.

We woke to a rather miserable day, with rain hovering on the mountains tops. John had never ski-ed before and booked in for a lesson straight away. I tried out my ski legs on my own and found that the few years of absence and the increasing years have not been kind to me. In addition, by the time we got to the slopes, it was raining quite hard, also sleeting and snowing at intervals. We were sopping, dripping wet, but determined to persevere. I had about an hour of braving the elements when I decided to take a brief break. I took off my skis, put them in the ski racks that are all over the place and went to the loo. By the time I got back, about 2 minutes later, some low life had nicked my skis!! I was devastated, and there was absolutely nothing I could do. My lift pass, a whopping $70 for the half day, was useless and a waste of all that money. I was not happy. Not at all. After John’s lesson (by then he was a wreck – he is not very fit) we went home, calling in at the ski hire place. They were very kind and I only had to pay TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS instead of $600+ for new skis, and then I had to hire more for the rest of the time. There was a bit of ranting and raving that night, and I still get viciously angry when I think about it.

Maria et al arrived that night, but well after midnight. We had a brief visit together in the morning but John had booked another lesson, so off he and I went, leaving the young ones to amuse themselves. In the end they didn’t even attempt to ski and just had a lazy weekend, showing Becky the farm animals and chilling out together.

That night we had a lovely braai outside around a big fire with the Murrumbidgee River flowing a few metres away. By then it had turned cold again and every morning we woke to heavy frost.

Sunday morning we left for the ski fields again, and Maria and family went home. John was getting on quite nicely, but unfortunately my enthusiasm had disappeared and I found it quite a struggle to go to the toilet and everywhere else with my skis glued to my body. There was no way I was leaving them anywhere again. So I had a few runs, a few hard falls, and started wondering if I was not getting too old for the game.

Monday morning we left for home. What a to-do about almost nothing, as far as I’m concerned.

Well, the rest of my letter contains just a few incidental snippets, like

Eventually getting the cleaners in again every fortnight (Gordon: “So I don’t have to feel guilty about not helping”.)
…. [and then the incidental snippets continued for another 2 pages]

Life is a miracle. What a to-do about almost nothing.

Holiday Gift Guide!!!!!!!

For my Christmas miracle, I am getting the bathroom professionally painted. Our painter looks kind of like Perez Hilton, and it is super tempting to ask if Britney is really preggerz or not!!!!!

WHAT I WANT: someone to READ MY MIND and pick the perfect thing for me, just like I would. Since I am totally proactive, I ordered myself a book from Amazon while I purchased things for my nieces and nephews.

However, I could not read the mind of Amazon.com and know that the 1-click default shipping address is not the same as the default address book address for Stone Age Slow Checkout. “Turn on 1-click,” the button said, so I obediently did, and then I 1-clicked a few times, and then I got some emails today to let me know my order was winging its way to my address from two years ago. Oops. I suppose this is all my own fault for not being a proper steward of my address book and being ever mindful of the awesome power of 1-click, but you’d think the 1-click elves might have noticed the address in that profile is different from the one where I have received eleventy jillion other orders. I ask too much, I know.

So I called Amazon and confused poor Nigel in the customer service holding pen. It sounded like it just might be in India. “Well, who lives there now,” he asked, when I told him the order was accidentally going to an old address. “Not me, and that is my problem.” He was able to re-route things with UPS after thirty agonizing minutes, but for another part of the order, I had to contact that “Amazon Partner.”

It turned out the consenting adult partner had shipped it via the regular post. They suggested I return the one going to the wrong address and order a different one. Since I can’t return something destined to remain out of my physical custody, I then made a bizarre series of phone calls to the USPS 800 number, my local post office, and the local delivery center. “Oh, you’ll need a supervisah, honey.” Luckily, I was put through to a saint named Wayne, and Wayne was able to flag the tracking number so it will be rerouted when it scans in to the delivery center. And moreover, he has a close friendship with both the carrier for my former route and the carrier for my current route. He also has friends who live in my building, so he is intimately aware of the location. Bless us all, Tiny Tim! I think I may get the $12 spy pen for my nephew after all. Lead poisoning ahoy! That was certainly worth an hour of my life. I am sending Wayne a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I will walk it over myself.

WHERE IS MY DINNER?

If the plant you wish to flee, go to sector 7G

As if Casa Vomitola has not already been in enough of a state of anomie lately, I got an email from Martha Stewart that was all “HEY LET’S PUT SOME GLITTER ON SOME PUMPKINS AND CALL IT A DAY.” This cannot be up with put, so I decided to resign from this uncomfortable communication once and for all. I am not sure how I got on this list in the first place. It probably had something to do with our wedding years ago, or perhaps it’s someone’s idea of a joke. Periodically, I open the Martha emails to find I can do something new with pork, or hot glue gun silver almond dragées to my baby or a turkey or something, but mostly I’ve been blithely deleting them.

When I clicked “unsubscribe,” I was taken to the following screen dominated with a Mao-like Martha, her smile cleverly applied in post-production. This screen told me to LOG IN TO MY ACCOUNT instead of just having one of the monkeys burn my email address in the database like every other unsubscribe function.

Oh hey, seems I don’t have an account, or at least they can’t seem to send me a password at the email address they regularly spam. Yes, I checked my junk box. So I must CREATE A LOGIN , giving them more information in order to get them to stop talking to me. The more I ignore you, the closer you get, Martha Stewart!

I dutifully filled out an account using plenty of raving in the form fields, and I finally was allowed to tick off “Do not send me anything ever.” But today I see that I am not actually free! Martha wants me to do something else with pumpkins. WHAT? Didn’t we already have this conversation? I am not going to go out with you just because you liked me first! We have standards here. I clicked “unsubscribe” again, only to be taken to this lovely unstyled Vignette error page:

(Note my username)

Apparently my rejection has caused the website to be so depressed that it simply can’t get out of bed. I decided that in the name of usability (theoretically how I earn a living) and all that is holy, I’d send the previously featured screen shots to MSLO customer service to help, but when I clicked on “Contact Us” I found that while I could get plenty of info on paint samples, anyone having an actual issue with the website gets a five or six question FAQ on downloading clip art instead of the means to actually submit a trouble ticket of any sort. That’s not the Martha I know! The Martha I know cares about every little sparrow and pixel. The Martha I know would print off my desperate email with ink she made herself, trim a lovely Scherenschnitte pattern into the margin, and dispatch a hand-raised snow white dove to my house to tell me it is sorry in original song!

But I did find the answer to one of my questions in the FAQ: It takes up to three weeks to be unsubscribed from the mailing list. Because I guess the SQL statement has to go out to the calligrapher.

***
In short, I feel overreaction is a mainstay of comedy! Don’t make me explain a joke, people. But srsly, this is wretched usability and a total disconnect from the public face of the brand. Or perhaps I am just taking it out on poor Martha because I have already spent this week dealing with the RMV, investment companies, actual criminals, a rogue play group, a no-sleep recidivist, insurance companies, and more. At least I did not walk five miles past lions or snipers to carry my groceries home, right? And nothing’s on fire. Yet.

What to eat: a sandwich (I wish!!!)

This just in: I am so completely and utterly bored with the internet that I opted to do actual work over reading one more stinking line in Google Reader. Although work still involves the internet, so I guess we have a little problem there. Somehow celebrities will have to wear ugly shoes without me. Life goes on. Somehow.

These days, it’s nigh on to impossible to be a renaissance man. There is simply too much content in the world. I realized this in one gleaming moment of disappointment when I was a teenager and consequently had my first panic attack in an aisle at Barnes & Noble. All those books! All that information! Summer reading lists are the least of our worries. Wrangle the brain chaff, wrangle it, before it buries you like a tsunami.

We have to be adroit enough to build our own highly curated channels of entertainment and educational content in order to avoid suffering total information burn out, but most of us are pretty lousy program directors. If we were given a million dollars and the severed head of Katie Couric so we could create primetime programming, we’d still run nothing but funny cats and grandmas falling down. Or perhaps a baby showing us what birds do. Being well-rounded is overrated.

What did I come here to do again?

Oh, hello, blank Blogger window! You must be here for a reason. I found you behind a half-finished site map, my online banking, iTunes, and a blog about shoes. Hi! What did I want to tell you? Do you know why I try to put chilled liquids away in the cabinets sometimes? Are you my mother? Do you know where I can find a perfect shirt dress? Do you want to pay me money to write breezy content?

On that last one, if you want to pay me for any of your content creation needs, do get in touch. I will get out all my nicest commas. They languish now in a drawer next to a cake server. I could tell you what I think of shorts worn in the evening. I can do investigative journalism where I make up most facts and key players. I think that is called fiction, or possibly it’s called working for a newspaper in Boston. I can ghost write thank-you notes for the most unimaginative gifts or write columns about real estate mistakes. You know you need a me on staff. You never ask for help. It’s not cool to be a martyr.

What, you say? Most people get jobs by having resumes and writing samples. Preposterous. Who has time for that? I’ve got four years of a grimy, crumpled, profane writing sample right here. I can see from my stats that plenty of people read this. I don’t know why, but thanks anyway! Who are you? Hi!

Of all the gin joints in all the tubes in all the internets

I’ve had a Gmail address for a long time now, since I am Early McAdopterson. I was able to get my first name, just for the hell of it. Great, right? I don’t even use it except for nefarious schemes and my Google Analytics account since I have plenty of other email addresses to wrangle. I receive password change requests at my main email address all the time I dragged myself over to check the box yesterday, and lo, at least four different citizens of the internet feel they are duly entitled to use my address. Just because they can’t log in and check their mail doesn’t mean they stop giving it out. Frequently, they even sign up for various accounts, allowing me access to their credit cards and home addresses.

A brief history:
August 2005 – Helen K___ of Wallingford, NJ opens a Blockbuster rentals account. She rented The Aviator. She has an American Express card. She also signed up for some “get paid to” sites, and I was able to get her standard password pretty easily (hellgirl, wish I’d thought of that one). I finally get Blockbuster to cancel the account under my email address after a confusing hour with several different reps on the phone.

January 2006 – present – Helene K___ of NY, NY is job hunting. Her resume gets lots of hits from Monster. Too bad she put the wrong damn email address on it. Helene also books a room at the Inn at Saratoga for a Valentine’s getaway. Her sister wants to make sure she knows about a $949,000 condo in Park Slope. In June, Helene has a job at a well-known ad agency. She makes sure I get a deck and brief on look and feel for a high profile cellular client. She also makes sure to give me the password to their extranet. Shockingly, she’s back to job hunting in October. When I emailed what I deduced was her real email, she wrote back and said “Oh, it happens, people just can’t grasp that I have an E in my name.” Neither can she, apparently, since she was forwarding all those work emails to herself.

March 2006 – Helen K___ of Athens, Greece signs up for web hosting. I can administer her account if I want. I don’t, luckily. She also joins Myspace. I reject all her friends now and then. I stuck a note in her profile to let her know she’s attached her account to an email address that doesn’t belong to her.

July 2006 – Helen N___ of Piscataway, NJ wants to sell a drum set and posts on Craigslist. I wonder if that ever sold?

Ongoing dead letter office:

Feb 16, from “David”
“Hey, haven’t heard from you in a while, but hope all is well with you and
your sis. NY’s a tough town for fragile souls . . . :)”

March 6, also from David

“H,

You got another package — a box this time, but I’m afraid the time has come.
Oslen told me he’s not going to accepti any more packages for you. As much
as I love to be your boy, I guess you’ll have to find some other use for me
🙂 I’m good at cooking, but not cleaning.

– D”

The answers usually do come in the mail, except when they don’t.

Oh, it’s ON

David blighted my inbox with a summons to Content Challenge. He actually blighted it last night, but I didn’t notice the oozing trail of poison until this morning. So I am already a day behind. Maybe that means I have to post until October 6 instead of October 5. I barely manage a shower most days, so this ought to be interesting. Or…not!

Other participants include: JWER
Moose and Squirrel
ETA: Biscuit Report

Now I’m going to get back to entertaining a peckish wolverine. Go look at my auctions. Why do I have any of this stuff?

The lights are on, but no one’s home

This is to serve as official notice that I will be off in a Swiss sanitarium for the next few weeks to months. I have a lot on my plate, so much so that I’m practically in need of bariatric surgery. Glarmph.

What to do with this space is turning into a puzzler. Frankly, work sucks, planning a wedding sucks, and there are only so many times one can discuss either of those topics. I’ve also noticed in the stats that this site is read by some people who are in my general orbit but definitely not close to me. They don’t mention that they read it, as close friends will actually do, and that’s kinda creepy. Even total strangers write in and make themselves known. Shouldn’t you people be busy looking for Buffy fanfic or something? This is public, of course, and you have a right to read. This knowledge helps me rule out the extremely personal as fodder. Not that I usually run on and on about gynecological hijinks or the joys of separating my laundry, but it’s nice to touch on actual human experiences now and then. So if my contribution to this site can’t be personal, what does that leave? The topical? That’s sooooo irrelevant.

Indeed, there are enough people doing pseudo scholarly analysis, movie reviews, and in depth-coverage of what they ate for breakfast. Ah, self-publishing at its finest. The world cries out for another pastiche of NYT links!

So I leave you for now in the capable hands of Lambchop. At least until after September 1, when I am absolved of some legal doings and can speak freely about something particularly hilarious. Until then, Lambchop’s wee paws are as soft as a baby’s hindquarters. She’s been soaking in something…

-xxoo

A sensitive problem for a sensitive individual

Dear Kitty Winn,

Attachments: right.scr, e23132zb24v[1].jpg

-frillysimsATmindspring.com

Dear frillysims,

That was SOME question. I would have to say that obviously I don’t know you very well, but you’d probably want to talk to a doctor sooner than later. I hear there are also some good hotlines for that. You don’t want to risk life-long infertility, now do you? And good lord, think of the cosmetic ramifications!

regards,

-Kitty

Pee Ess: Kitty is using a Mac, you can’t touch her with your zany microsoft scripting, even if she DID open attachments from strangers!

Off we go!

If you are ever in East Berlin, cialis you must go to “russian disco”. Its in an old east german bar, the Café Burger, that still has the low ceilings and tacky wallpaper. The music was eastern european- it was like being at a latvian wedding, complete with violins, trombones, and lots of foot stomping. I danced all night long and drinks were poured down my throat. They make a stiff one there, they do.

On saturday I bloody got klezzed! the world is a malicious and awful place, even if you are only sitting in front of your computer. So if anybody gets an email from me with a funny looking attachment, do Not open it, even if it claims to be a picture of my bottom. it was sent by the devil!

Tomorrow I am off early to my opening in Essen in a mini-bus. I have an entourage of seven! and I have bought cookies and juice boxes for all of them! Its a long drive, but i have much to do. I will spend the entire duration applying makeup. and playing travel connect 4. The opening should be very fun and glamorous- I am slowly mastering the art of getting drunk enough to charm people so they want to buy my work, and not so drunk that i puke on their shiny new kenneth coles. There is going to be a cocktail pianist!

smooch