Tattoos? I don’t think so
Posted By vblack on January 14, 2012
This morning I stood in front of a class of students for the first time in two years. It felt good. I miss teaching. I wish I was able to teach full time, but there are a lot of walls to overcome for that to ever be a reality and the years are adding up. It doesn’t look likely. At least I get to make a living doing the other thing I enjoy, working with computers.
To help manage this class, I resurrected this old website, vicblack.com and told my class that they are to send all homework to vicblack-at-vicblack-dot-com. I logged in to that email address for the first time in over a year this evening to check homework.
It was pretty funny what I found.
Of course I had the usual Spam junk. But I also had several emails that had the word “Tattoo” in the subject line. I assumed they were just additional spam. I saw one email that referenced a meeting, and the way the subject line was written made me think it was not spam. So I opened it. I was right it was not spam. It was an email from a man who said he had an appointment with me about getting a tattoo. No, not about me getting a tattoo from him, but him getting a tattoo from me! He thought I was a tattoo artist. He even mentioned he has seen my work on other people and loved it.
Let me set the record clear right now: I AM NOT A TATTOO ARTIST!!! Somehow this guy had me mistaken for someone else.
So, I opened the other emails that had the word Tattoo in the subject line and sure enough none of them were spam, they were all about me providing tattoo services. Now, for those of you who may not know me, I do not know how to give a tattoo. I have never seen it done. I have no tattoos. However, these people are saying that they have seen my work and love it. They tell me that I am a great tattoo artist. One email, received just two weeks ago, was from a lady who was referred to me all the way from Los Angeles. This was making no sense.
Finally, I read an email that explained what happened. This particular email was actually part of an exchange of emails between three people. One person was named Erin. From the exchange of emails I determined that Erin had approached Carrie, the second person in the exchange of emails, about a tattoo. Apparently the tattoo was complicated so Carrie had shown the art work to me, referred to simply as Vic in the email exchange. At one point, Vic had responded to Carrie about how much he looked forward to doing this tattoo. Vic’s email address was vic-at-vicback-dot-com. I noticed in the email header of the email I received it was sent to vic-at-vicblack-dot-com. Erin had mis-typed the email address and instead of sending it to her brilliant tattoo artist, she sent it to me and I didn’t read it for eight months.
I checked out Vic Back’s website and, sure enough, if you want a tattoo, it appears this guy can do ANYTHING. His tattoos look like works of art. I don’t want to be a living needle work canvas, so I will pass, but I have to admit he is good.
Moral of the story is, email addresses are easy to mess up.
Some things to remember so you don’t send emails to the wrong guy and so other don’t send your emails to the wrong guy (or gal):
- If you write your email address down for someone, write clearly and legibly.
- If you tell someone your email address, spell it out; don’t rely on them knowing how to spell what you say. Said quickly, Back could sound like Black.
- If someone is telling you their address, or someone else’s, make them spell it out.
- When you type an email address, make sure you spell correctly.
- If you send an email, don’t automatically assume they recipient received it.
One of the emails was from a young lady who said that a friend of hers referred her. She said her friend told her that Vic Back may be too busy but hoped he would be able to at least refer her to someone else. I showed the emails to my daughter and she said, “well he’s not busy now. YOU took all his customers.”