Illustration via Boys with Banjos
Yesterday we had such gorgeous weather here in Paris! The sun was not only shining but it was blindingly bright, reflecting off the puddles and shiny streets from the heavy rain we had earlier in the morning. Today we're back to overcast, cool and grey, yesterday was simply a little teaser of whats to come: the much anticipated Paris in the springtime. Can't wait. Having a rare free afternoon to myself, I moved my desk closer to the opened window that looks out onto our little street, and nestled in with a cup of tea to do a monthly check-in to my Yahoo account. Why I don't just delete the account all together, I don't know. I have in the past admitted to being a bit of a digital hoarder and have trouble letting go of pictures, screen names, email addresses, word documents, and aol accounts (vive [email protected]!). Hidden under a pile of Linked In requests and Career Builder job posts was an e-mail received from the father of my friend Jean. Random. Now you're wondering, why would my friend's dad's have access to my e-mail address? Is this the prequel to the creepy dad story from last week? No, not in the slightest, my life isn't that juicy. Before Jean relocated to Tokyo in 2011, he put me in touch with his father to join a jogging protest to close off the berges along the Seine, allowing only pedestrians and bicyclists. I ended getting broken up with that week and had to move out of my home. My concerns for Parisians to enjoy a vehicle free walkway along the river fell low on my priorities, and never made it to the protest. Curious that I would receive a note from him after our brief two e-mail correspondence almost two years ago, I couldn't imagine what this was about. Maybe he was pissed that I flaked out, or wanted to share photos from the protest, if it in fact even took place? I had no clue. The e-mail was neither his disappointment, nor details of his jogger's movement. Jean's Dad contained a link with job offers that he thought I'd be interested in. How kind of him to think of me...so many years later.
It had been a while since I'd spoken with Jean, perhaps he didn't realize that I have been working for several months now. I clicked through some of the jobs currently available here in Ile-de-France but none of the picks met my experience or skills. On top of sending Jean a Happy New Year e-mail, I also made a mental note to be sure to thank Jean's Dad for reaching out to me. An hour had passed and pulling myself out of a deep Facebook status haze, I looked up at my Yahoo tab and saw that I had 206 e-mails waiting for me. 206? It would take six months to accumulate 206 to that account. How was this even possible? My inbox was bleeding with "Mailer-Daemon" return to sender receipts of e-mails I had apparently sent? Quoi? Much to my horror, I clicked on my sent folder to see that "I" had sent out e-mails to over 600 contacts in my address book. Okay, so not nearly as embarrassing as when the president and designer of the fashion house I worked at in New York sent out a global company email announcing cut backs, in particular Christmas bonuses due to the year's "soft" sales figures, and one of the VPs replied all (I repeat, replied all!) thanking them for making an exception for a select few, and that she was able to put a down payment on an a home on Croton-on-Hudson. Not that bad, but embarrassing enough. The worst part is that just how I thought Jean's Dad's e-mail was real, so did everyone else. My brother sent a snippy e-mail reminding me that he already had a job, Seb's father Gilles thanked me for thinking of him but informed me that he had retired several years ago, Brett wanted to know all of these cryptic e-mails were about because he had received four of them (get real Brett, I may be many things but secretive and cryptic?), the parents of my students misunderstood and thought it was a passive-aggressive gesture announcing my current job hunt, and executives from Louis Vuitton to Christian Dior to Marc Jacobs all received this random e-mail from me. What the "job post link" did was that it emailed every single person in my address book with a clever filter that populated the first name of each recipient in the subject, for example, "Hi MF!: P", "Hi Lucien! : P", "Hi MF's female friend that I merely tolerated! : P", "Hi LVMH Human Resources! : P" Yes, with the little tongue emoticon. You know, just to make sure I really look like an asshole.
I. am. mortified.
Several friends of mine fell victim to the spam attack after opening my e-mail, and they all had the same embarrassed reaction that I had. This whole experience got me thinking, even if the sent messages didn't contain a pesky spam link, I would have still be mortified. Why is that? Nothing terribly inappropriate or personal was included in these e-mails, so what is it about reaching out to people you haven't spoken to in a while or that you don't know so nerve-wracking? Why would an appearingly friendly e-mail with job posts be so embarrassing? I know people who have thousands of Facebook friends but would never dare send a message or "like" something of half of them in fear that it would be seen as "random". In a time where connecting with others is easier than ever, why do we hold back so much? I quickly sent out an apologetic e-mail for the spam and advising all to not click on the link. Luckily no one was too pissed off with me, well except for Kitty who got cyber-cornered with an awkward correspondence with one of her guido ex-boyfriends from Glen Cove. This little crisis did put me back in contact with a bunch of people I hadn't seen or spoken to in years, and with everything in my life, I learned a thing or two. I learned who had changed jobs based on the e-mails that were bounced back, hackers are more powerful than they get credit for, and ilovemycat246 is no longer considered to be a strong password.
