The Ugly One!

Lately my farts have been smelling like rancid peanut butter, among other things. Historically I have been associated with being quite the gaseous and, at times, noxious individual (my burps smell like death, this is true) and while I like to think this is rather falsely attributed at times, of late that is not the case. The point is, I haven't even really been eating all that much peanut butter. In fact, only today did I consume any peanut butter and, since then, nothing noxious to report. I think it's probably a job for my man Robert Stack on Unsolved Mysteries. Robert Stack is one of those people that I feel can only possibly exist somewhere in the television world; he just seems too ridiculous to ever actually be a real human being.

Speaking of human beings, according to much of the Wesleyan community, I am actually this lady. Please note, if you will, the e-mail listed. That is Julie's (and even if I don't know her personally, I feel connected to her since I get a lot of her e-mail) actual e-mail. Unfortunately, very few people at Wesleyan that have found the need to contact Professor Solomon have taken the time to note the presence of a middle initial in her e-mail address. The first time I got an e-mail intended for poor Julie I believe it was from the TAs for one of her classes. I ignored it until I soon received two more. At this point I sent an e-mail, in the very lowest quality of French (I contend I was once a bit of a scholar, but now is no longer once), informing the TAs that they had not contacted their professor, and provided them with her proper e-mail, which I obtained with a quick search on the campus website. I considered this somewhat of going the extra mile, like when I found that a guy had left his atm card in the machine at a local Wachovia two days ago and, not only did I not ring up charges on it, I actually went out onto the street to find him. Lest anyone miss my sarcasm and think me a real bastard (at least for this reason), I did and do not consider either effort to be any great feat.

Anyway, I probably didn't really expect a thank you from the TAs, especially since I might have referred to them as bete in my e-mail, but I also might have been a little nonplussed not to receive one. Actually, I didn't care at all, I just found it astounding and very consistent with most human behavior to not point out their error to any of the students in the class. Actually, to use that word again, maybe they did. I do not know. What I do know is that soon I started receiving e-mails from students explaining why they were missing class, asking me to move exam dates, asking me when exam dates were, and even attaching assignments as word documents. In at least two more instances I took the initiative to forward the messages to the real Julie Solomon and, to her credit, Julie sent me a very sweet e-mail apologizing for my being inconvenienced and thanking me for passing along the messages. Poor Julie. I wonder what all the students I didn't inform of their error thought of her. Perhaps, eventually, they would come to Julie and ask her if she had received their messages or why she hadn't responded to them. And maybe they just thought Julie was a bit of a wench. And maybe they were right. After all, I don't actually know Julie. Again, these kids were probably too embarrassed to mention to their classmates their little cock-up. Or maybe they just figured no one else would make their mistake of not actually looking up someone's e-mail or ignoring the e-mail address Julie had given them.

The fact is, this started a long time ago, probably early in the fall of 2006. Surely I told a few people about this already, and I may even have mentioned it in my old blog, but having received yet another e-mail of late, in error, I couldn't pass up the chance to talk about it again. So that is the real kicker: students were not the only ones making these errors. Colleagues, and even the departmental I don't know what they are definitely called but probably secretaries, who send out information to professors were sending all of these messages to me instead. Once more, and only once, I forwarded the message to Julie and informed the sender of their error. This was before the dawn of 2007 even, and I don't even know how many more e-mails I have received and ignored. Good samaritan only goes so far, and who knows if I am one of those anyway. If someone can't be troubled to actually look up someone's fucking e-mail, why should I be troubled to pass these messages along? One of these e-mails was even from a colleague to meet for lunch in the summer or something like that and I mean really I make mistakes all the time, but this one seems pretty idiotic to me. I wonder if it is some sort of federal violation that I read these e-mails. They are addressed to me after all, so I doubt it. I wonder if it will be when I start posting their e-mails on my blog when I get to lazy to actually write anything original.

But if anger was conveyed in this post, I erred in my writing. I didn't get mad, I got glad. These e-mails are way better than spam stock tips and offers for Russian brides, or those ones from lawyers in Africa who only need my identity info to send me part of my inheritance from a distant relative. I wonder if all of Julie's colleagues think she is a bitch as a result. Poor Julie…