18 August, 2006

misdirected emails

Robin over at the Internet Institute for the Easily Amused has an amusing post about a misdirected email. Email is such a handy thing but can go oh so wrong if you're not paying attention.

I have many email addresses and one of them happens to be a very common name. As you might imagine, I get many emails sent to me by accident. Usually it's because the person with the similar email address gives it out incorrectly.

Some of the emails include boring stuff, like 'will you pick up Steven on the weekend?' and 'Joe, are you going to be at soccer on the weekend?' or I'll get a gazillion test emails 'just to see if this works'.

Others are more amusing. One was from someone who did uniform orders and was corresponding with someone about mistakes made in a school order. The first couple itemised the mistakes the employees were making, the last sounded like the poor writer was about to have a nervous breakdown. Not surprisingly since the mistakes in the school's order were pretty major. Sounds like the company sent uniforms in a range of sizes, including a large number of women's size 22, 24 and 26 (for those outside Australia those sizes are very very large). Then there were hats in sizes that were equivalent to a 1 year old and 2 year old's head size. To top it all off the embroidery was done in the wrong colours!

I think the most amusing misdirected email though, was the person who did an online IQ test. The results came back as:

Hello Joe (name changed to protect the identity)

Your age adjusted IQ score is 98 and the average score is 100.

Your IQ score is the result of a formula based on the number of
questions answered correctly on the test. This score has been further
adjusted to account for the differences in capabilities among various
age groups. Your percentile score means that you scored higher than 45%
of the people who took this same test.


Your Grade:Lower Average

Total number of questions:30
Questions answered:27
Questions not answered:3
Questions answered correctly:13
Questions answered incorrectly:17
Percentage correct answers:43%

Surprise, surprise - the other thing he got wrong, was his email address.

You know, I often wonder if he even realised that he'd given the wrong email address and was just sitting there anxiously awaiting the results that would reveal his brilliant IQ.

5 comments:

High Power Rocketry said...

I just got an email to a strange email address. It was simply sent by the computer to the wrong person. Rather than (example to prevent spam uses fake email) to sammy23@gmail.com, this email was supposed to go to massy32@gmail.com. I am not making up this difference: the person was very different in name than me. Yet I got her email. Lucky it was not too personal.

Robin said...

Hey Cara, thanks for the plug, and the link too. If I ever get around to cleaning up my links, you'll be in mine as well. You and I have a bit more in common too. I'm in Application Support with a software development company, and before my three year stint at home with my kids, I did Help Desk/Tech Support for a large IT consulting company.

Hello Betty said...

I had a similar problem with my personal eamail address.

I kept on getting emails for job interviews and references..

Needless to say, I don't think her job search was very successful. lol

caramaena said...

Alex, Izzy, it's amazing how easily things go astray, isn't it?

We get some very interesting emails at work (part of my job is to answer the support emails). I'd love to just copy and paste them into the blog but the company is very strict on stuff like that.

Robin, thanks in advance for a link. I appreciate it.

caramaena said...

mbic - no sexy conversations gone wrong yet (I live in hope ;) hehe)

As for blackmail material, there was one file that was sent by someone who works for the same company as I do. He's very lucky it was me that got it. If it had gone to a complete stranger there could have been a huge privacy/security breach if it had been passed onto the press or released on the net.