Yesterday apparently a lady with a first name similar to mine and a last name similar to what i go by on the internet bought a new car in Oxford, MI — I know this, because either she or the dealership misspelled her email and I’m getting the emails about it at my kelldar gmail. I had to tell myself not to take the customer satisfaction survey because that would not have been a nice thing to do.
Last year — it may have been this same lady, I can’t remember now — joined a clothing website using my kelldar gmail and bought a bunch of stuff. I was able to log-in, look at all of her shipping information and everything. I didn’t do this maliciously, I was genuinely trying to find some way of contacting this person to forward them their stuff, or at least get the site’s customer service team to stop emailing me. (If I HAD been a terrible person – I could have rerouted the shipment to my own address. But I’m not! So I just contacted the customer service email and explained the situation. I’m not sure they understood – it was one of the vaguely-scammy overseas super cheap women’s clothing stores).
But none of these top Lyman.
For years… literally, nearly a decade… Lyman has thought my kelldar gmail belonged to one of their children. The first couple of times I saw name come up in my inbox I didn’t even think ab out it, because Lyman’s last name is actually the same as another relative of mine — a very common last name. So I thought Lyman was somehow connected to that person. Because all of the emails I got from Lyman were just forwarded chain mail sort of things. You know, early clickbait. Stuff you’d go to Snopes to debunk. I just ignored it for years, because none of it was important.
Finally one day I got an email that had a bunch of attached photos. It was Lyman apparently telling their son/daughter (?) that they were getting rid of a bunch of furniture and stuff and if they wanted any of it, to come get it. The photos were pictures of all of the furniture and things. At this point, I decided it was time to tell Lyman the truth. I replied, and explained that I think he had misspelled his recipient’s email address, I was not the right person, and as he probably wanted his child to see this message, he may want to double check and send again.
I got no response from Lyman.
After that, in between the forwarded chain emails, I actually got a handful more “personal” emails from Lyman. Each time I would reply, explain to them that they had the wrong address, etc. I’d never get a reply to any of these.
There weren’t so many emails from Lyman that it was ever annoying. Maybe 8-10 a year. And I got the impression that Lyman may have been an older man, I guess maybe because all of his emails, included the forwards, reminded me of my grandfather’s. So I never really got frustrated with him emailing me.
It all came to a head in 2014, when I received an email with a subject line, “need help.” Somehow, Lyman’s outgoing email name had been changed to FUCK YOU (his last name). He asked how to get the “f u” out of his name.
So I tried to explain how to get to his gmail settings and change his outgoing name.
And then I got the only response I EVER got from Lyman — and, this was also the last email I ever got from him:
I miss you, Lyman!