This by far is the most funny email message I have ever received:
Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 13:48:22 -0700 From: hidden To: jfriedl@yahoo.com Subject: Saw your book. It's tripe. I learned more from man pages and googling. I feel bad for any schmuck who wasted their money on that garbage. I hear you are a real jackass. Not surprised. Your picture looks like a typical jackass. Fortunately your kids don't look like their dad, yikes. Your lame blog form doesn't even work right. Anyway, you suck and you've done all that you can. May as well hide out in Japan with your internet mail order wife. Cheers
The lack of a subject line almost got this message blocked by my spam filter, but luckily it got through.
I think it's a great testament to my writing skills that someone who knows me only from my various writings can so well and truly know me. The only part of the message that gives me pause is the comment about the “blog form” not working -- which form, and what's not working? I need more details...
(I've elided the name and email address of the sender, as I suspect it's fake, although I've never heard the name before.)
Leave a comment...
This brings back memories of an email that caused me to be selected as the only available email address on our corporate website (the contact form previously had a drop down with different departments, each supposedly routing to actual different people. After this email went to all the departments the contact form was routed to me only, to protect the “sensitive” members of the company). It went something like:
“You d____bags, you couldn’t pick a stock if your lives depended on it. Whatever moron picked ____ shouldn’t be allowed to pick his own nose. The public hates you and wishes you would all drop dead!. . . [etc., etc.]”
The head counsel for the company, on seeing the email, said “Some people have no sense of humor” ;). I saved the email for a long time.
Ironically, the stock in question was up 15% a year later.
You’ve probably heard quite a bit from people who benefited from your work but I’ll counterbalance this guy by saying that I’ve regularly studied from your book on regular expressions, trying to get better and trying to *think* in Regexs more and more. It’s great work and I’ve been inspired by it.
It’s sad that there’s always loones to deal with, but that’s the nature of things it seems.
Hope that Japan treats you well. Now that I know about this blog I’ll be aggregating…
That was pure art. I never realized there was an aesthetic to being such an asshole.
See that’s exactly the kind of awkward thoughtlessness that makes me reluctant to mention anything about my family or personal affairs online. I don’t post pictures of my family online (unless it’s a restricted viewing kind of setup), I very rarely even mention that I have family, and even then I don’t use their names. Personal privacy versus free expression I suppose.
There’s some good posts like this back on Craigslist in the Bay Area. I love the really random ones that are addressed to someone like “To the imbecile who stole my bicycle…”
I like that he signs it off with “Cheers”. That’s classy.