Sunday, June 3, 2007

Technology is the Devil

Good god, technology is the DEVIL. Yet another installation of the stupidity that abounds in my life. (see earlier post on the cell phone incident). Anyway, a few weeks ago I got this idea from LinkedIn that I could find friends by searching for their email address. Since it's the one thing that people really can't avoid in the silly little website we call myspace. So after spending way too long looking people up I started snooping. *Insert cliche about curiosity and the cat.* I decided that it would be a good idea to see what this person who we'll call SWM was up to (protecting the identity of the not so innocent)

The problem was I couldn't remember which email service they used. I go to that nifty search feature and I enter one address and nothing comes up. Then I click in the box, delete the first .com and put in the second.com. This is where it gets ugly. Myspace, much like Microsoft, automatically does things that one might ordinarily find helpful. It assumed that because I couldn't find the email that I might wish to invite this "friend" that I've searched on. And so my trigger finger being faster than my brain hit the button to the right thinking I'm searching again on the new email address and instead I end up clicking invite. As soon as it happened I realized what I had done and freaked.

So what does any normal person do, they email the help site to see if there's a way to stop it. Alas, it takes myspace about 20 days to respond and needless to say I was out of luck. So then I think, "well, perhaps it wasn't the right email address, maybe nothing happened. Maybe, just maybe there is a kind God out there who will prevent this email from reaching SWM and I'll be spared the problem of dealing with the aftermath".

No such luck.

Weeks go by, I forget about it until one day a little note appears that I have a new message. SMW is indeed out there and he has now responded. I damn near had a heart attack. After hyperventilating, I sent a polite message back saying "oh, just wondering how you're doing, blah, blah, blah, hope all is well". To the casual observer this may seem like not such a big deal however if anyone recalls my story about a series of incidents involving SWM, you'll understand why this is disturbing on a whole new level.

So the moral of the story is, don't go looking for something...you just may find it. Oh, and technology is the devil.

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