Random acts of email stupidity

A couple of years ago, some cataclysmic event or other happened to my computer (clearly it was so cataclysmic all memory of it has been wiped from my mind, because I’m dammed if I can remember what it was) and I was forced to re-enter all of my Outlook contacts by hand.

Not long after this, I found out my mum was no longer receiving email from me. At all. Everyone else was receiving my messages just fine, and she was getting emails from everyone else but me (it was actually a pretty sweet deal for her, to be honest), so clearly we had a mystery on our hands.

And clearly I couldn’t be bothered investigating this mystery too deeply, or, indeed, at all, because rather than try to find out WHY this was happening, I chose to do absolutely nothing about it, and blithely continued firing off emails to my mother’s email address. This is why my childhood dream of being Nancy Drew when I grew up was never realised, obviously.

Now, my mum and I are close. I tell her things I probably wouldn’t tell other people. So it came as something of a horrible surprise when some guy in Nova Scotia contacted me to let me know he’d been receiving email from me for quite some now, and by the way, how was that rash coming along and had I ever located the source of that funny smell in the kitchen?

My mum’s name is Norma. My mystery correspondent was called Norman. You can see what I did there, can’t you?

Of course, after that, I totally learned my lesson and I was always really careful when sending email to make sure I was sending them to the right person, and not, say, sending them to be published on a national news website. Oh no, wait, my mistake: I didn’t learn my lesson at all, did I? Which is why, when my mum used the “send to a friend” function on the Sky News website last weekend to send me a link to a story, I just hit “reply”, without realising that my reply was going, not to my mum, but to the wesbite’s comment section.

Oops.

When I got a “Thank you for posting your comment on Sky News!” email a few minutes later I was, like, really confused and thought it must be some kind of mistake. And it was. But it was my mistake. D’oh.

I mean, it was an easy mistake to make. Anyone could’ve done it. Well, anyone with the brain of a gnat, obviously. And when I realised my mistake, I obviously learned my lesson for good this time, and made sure I never did the same thing ever again, didn’t I?

Er, no. Because Outlook automatically saves the email address of everyone I reply to into my address book (note to self: make it not do that any more), which now contains entries for ‘Mum’, ‘Mum – work’ and ‘Mum – Sky News’.

Guess which one I’ve been sending my emails to?

This is why, if you happen to have visited the Sky News website this week you may have noticed a long comment from me asking someone to pick me up a certain brand of face cream next time they happen to be in Tesco. You’d know it was me because, er, my full name would be on it, plus my email signature, containing links to all of my websites.

Um, sorry, Sky News! But if you could send me that face cream, that would be grand, thanks!

(Note: although I did get another “Thanks for posting a comment on our website!” email, I can’t seem to find the comment in question, so presumably someone at Sky removed it. And probably banned me, into the bargain. Which would be fair enough, under the circumstances…)