Email Mixups

There are several people out there who have the same name as me.

NB: If you are bothered by or unhappy with the content of this blog, then it is written by one of the other people with my name. I don’t know why she keeps writing these crazy things on the internet! People keep thinking it’s me! So embarrassing!

Two of the other people with my name keep accidentally giving out my email address. One of them lives in Colorado, and the other one lives in Brooklyn. The one who lives in Brooklyn is looking for a job, and she has applied for a few jobs—and put my email address on her online application.

One online application site is a total amateur hour. You don’t need to verify your email address before completing the registration process, so she submitted her address, phone number, and job application connected to my email address. Once she had submitted all this information, the recruiter site sent “her” (me) an email confirmation. I went to the site, clicked the “I forgot my password” link, reset the password, logged in, and got her information from the “My Profile” page.

Today I got a strange recruiting email. Usually most of the recruiting spam I get is from small tech companies who misunderstand my aspirations, interests, and skillset. (In case you are wondering, my dream job is “software muse,” in which I hang around the office and people can bounce ideas off of me about whatever it is that they’re working on. But I could also do “catalyst” or “artist in residence.” And on a contract basis, you can pay me to remind you that Likert scale data is not normally distributed.) Today, though, I got an email for a recruiter for a public school for poor kids in New Jersey.

Odds are that this enticement to apply was meant for the woman from Brooklyn, so I wrote back to the recruiter and gave her the cell phone number I got from the job application profile.