On Friday, a very disturbing email flooded in:
—–Original Message—–
From: Tights With Flip-Flops Woman
Sent: 27 February 2009 16:45
To: Amber, Finder of Everything
Subject: tights for flip flops
I have a friend who has “problem feet” and wonder if you could supply tights for her to wear flip flops.
Then there was a phone number for me to call with news of the tights-for-flip-flops.
Now, straight away, I can see two problems with this:
1. I AM NOT A SHOP. No, seriously, I’m going to say this again, because the message is clearly not getting through: NOT. A. SHOP. Over the past few weeks there’s been a dramatic increase, not only in the “where can I buy the Topshop dress you featured three years ago?” emails, but in the “I want to buy your [insert product here], when can I get it?” stuff. Honestly. I mean, I’m no brainiac myself, but surely it’s not THAT hard to figure out that TheFashionPolice.net is… wait for it… NOT A SHOP? Apparently not.
2 . If I WAS a shop, I would not be selling these:
(Picture via this post which, you may notice, contains a link to the website selling them. Which is not run by me, needless to say.)
Now, I know about Tabi, and I know this unfortunate woman whose friend emailed me has “problem feet” which apparently make tights-with-flip-flops the only option (WHAT IS THIS CONDITION?), so I will say no more about this other than that the thought of actually wearing those individual nylon “toes” bothers me for reasons I can’t quite articulate. But moving on…
I replied to the tights-seeker, and I told her that no, I can’t supply tights for flip-flops, because I do not have a shop. And she replied:
“can I order on line?
Do you have any tights with a part for a flip flop”
And then I took out the gun I keep under my desk and I shot myself in the head. Because almost every day now there is some variation of this exchange. Almost every day. I spend so much of my time having to spell out to people that no, I do not sell anything, I just write about stuff, that I’m actually thinking I may as well start selling stuff. I mean, I seem to have a ready-made customer base waiting for me, if only I could find out where to bulk-buy tights-for-flip-flops and dresses from three years ago.
(Note: not an invitation to contact me offering job lots of Toe Tights).
Gah.
Tagged email fun, I am not a shop, Outfits
Terry pointed out this morning that my last post here was not only several days ago, but was also a post in which I insinuated that if there were no further posts, er, I was probably dead. Whoops.
Well, I’m not dead, although thanks for the massive outpouring of anxiety, folks! I’m just lazy busy. Also, The Voice hasn’t spoken again since, and if I can’t give you tales of mysterious voices which speak in my bedroom, then what can I give you? Absolutely nothing has happened recently. It’s just been all work and no play, and you know what that makes Amber, right? Yes, it makes her a CHUNKY MONKEY. I know this because someone very kindly left a comment on The Fashion Police to that effect this morning. The full text of the comment read:
“That dress looks like all ur faces! Don’t hate the player hate the game! Ur chunky monkeys! “
Geniuses walk amongst us, folks, they really do. And just imagine, there’s a dress in the world that looks like ALL my faces! Wow! Not just one of my faces, ALL of them! And I are a chunky monkey – sorry, monkeys, plural, whee!
Another excellent comment from today, this time concerning one of my “Ugly Prom Dress” posts:
“naw aint no way in hell she must was on drugs or something need to kill herself asap”””thats sad a hot mess omg omg omg omg omgll”’
Omg omg omg omg omg, indeed! Because a bad dress is totally good reason to kill yourself, “naw”? ASAP!
After some consultation with my Twitter followers, I have decided to give this bizarre type of English used by tween blog commenters a name. I am going to call it “Blinglish” – the type of English used in blog comments. And, having named it, I am now adding it to my list of Things I Would Ban If I Ruled the World. A further example of “Blinglish” can be found here, incidentally).
I’m quite liking being a Chunky Monkey, though.
Tagged email fun, the fashion police
I’m feeling a little better today. Only a little, but hey, at least I wasn’t up all night waiting for the sweet release of death, so that’s something.
In a break from our regularly scheduled “Woe is me!” programme, then, I present an email I received this morning from one “Cathelina Waldron”, who I can only assume has stumbled across one of my posts on the subject of 80′s fashion over at The Fashion Police.
Cathelina writes:
“First off i want to say that CLEARLY you dont know nothing about fashion if you state that 80s fashion is a crime of fashion, and also you stated that there was very little about 80s fashion to love. I just want to say that you are wrong, you just have to love everything about the 80s fashion. In case you havent already noticed the 80s fashion has laid out the foundation for the fashions that we have today. In fact 80s fashion is still in fashion. You must feel really dumb for posting that. Considering it makes you look like you dont know anything about what you are talking about. if you need examples i will gladly give them to you to present to you how wrong you are about 80s fashion, and how it is infact, still in fashion today! “
(Spelling and grammar as in the original. Imagine the text of this email in bright pink to get the full effect.)
So. Obviously I had no idea I was supposed to run all of my opinions past this woman, who clearly has the authority to tell me that I “have” to love certain things. This has seriously concerned me: I wonder if there are other things out there that I “have” to love, but don’t, because Cathelina hasn’t written to me yet to tell me what my opinion should be on them? Maybe I should ask her to give me a list of all the things I “have” to love? Hmm.
All sarcasm aside, though, can you even IMAGINE getting THAT annoyed about someone’s opinions on shell-suits and puffball skirts that you feel the need to email them an ugly rant? Seriously, I have no idea what Cathelina’s problem is, but I really hope she’s getting help for her obvious issues…
I also hope the wind blows really hard and messes up her hair.
Tagged email fun, OMG internet drama!, the fashion police
Remember how earlier this week I was getting in a little bit of advance worrying about tonight’s full moon, and the generous helping of Crazy it would no doubt bring to my life?
I was right to worry.
This morning I woke up to an email from Companies House, who, for the benefit of those of you who don’t like in the UK, or, indeed, run your own business, govern all activity by limited companies in this country. If you run a business you have to be registered with them, and there are all kinds of rules you have to abide by if you don’t want Very Bad Things to happen.
Anyway, as I was saying, this morning I woke up to an email from Companies House, in which they informed me that my business is now under investigation for a possible breach of “Section 82 of the Companies Act 2006″.
So, obviously I immediately died.
When I revived myself, I read on, and discovered that I was being investigated for breaching this Act because a concerned member of the public had reported me for it.
So I died again.
A couple of coffees later (and, OK, brandy), I read on. Helpfully, Companies House had not just started a new email to tell me I was – insert Drum Roll of Doom here – Under Investigashun. No, they had just forwarded on the entire email conversation they’d been having with the person who had reported me. A person who, I was to learn, was accusing me of:
a) owing her money
and
b) being a taxi driver
It was at this point that alarm bells started to ring. I feverishly read the email again, and – YES! – there it was! The woman had not reported me AT ALL! In fact, she had reported a COMPLETLY DIFFERENT COMPANY to Companies House, and OK, it’s a company that has a similar name to mine, but the woman had supplied them with the Company Number AND the website address (which, just to be clear here, was NOT MY WEBSITE ADDRESS), both of which made it perfectly clear that they done got the wrong person. The right person being someone who is NOT ME. And who has nothing to do with me. Whew!
What is totally bizarre about this, is that, having been supplied with the URL of the company the woman was complaining about, Companies House didn’t just visit that URL (I did, and it works) and contact the company in question. No, they apparently hit up Google, searched for a completely different company with a similar-sounding name, and then contacted that person instead. (That person being ME.) Freaking GENIUS, no?
Oh, and as if that wasn’t enough, they also forwarded me a private email conversation between them and the woman who originally contacted them. I now know her name, her email address, and all about how much money she is owed by a third party. Whose details, including their company number, I now ALSO have, thanks to Companies House. I bet that company is thrilled to know that I, Magic Amber, am now party to their dispute!
A good morning’s work by Companies House, then, who have, thankfully, replied to the “WTF?” email I sent them earlier this morning with a “Whoops! No, it’s not YOU that’s under investigation!”. So that’s something.
Incidentally, the woman who wanted to know where her Heidi Klum skin care order was? Never did get back in touch. Magic Amber is pleased to have been of service…
Tagged email fun, I See Stupid People
Lately I’ve noticed a dramatic increase in the number of people mistaking me for God. By that I don’t mean they’re getting down on their knees and worshipping the wonder that is Me, or even that they praise me like they should, just that they think I know EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING.
I know, I know: it’s an easy mistake to make. Am authoritative figure, obviously! So every day I get a whole bunch of emails via The Fashion Police , saying stuff like, “Dear Magic Amber, OMG, I really want a pair of boots that you wrote about in 2006, I have seriously looked at every website on the internet for them, and I can’t find them anywhere, but I know you will be able to find them for me!”
And I’ll be all, “Umm, no, I won’t. Because I am not made of magic, and if you’ve already looked EVERYWHERE with no luck, it’s unlikely I’ll have much luck either, on account of the fact that previously hidden boots do not suddenly become visible to the All Seeing Eye of Amber the Omniscient”. And also because the boots are always from somewhere like Topshop, or Dorothy Perkins, or some other high street store, and trust me, if THEY don’t still stock their own boots three years later, no one else will, either.
Because I am all about helping people, though, (Am benevolent Divine Being), I will generally try and suggest alternatives if I can think of any, before giving in and saying, “Dude: eBay.” (The ones who email me saying, “OK, I’m looking for thigh high boots that are purple with orange spots on, and come in a UK size 12 with a square toe, a heel that is exactly 4.2″ high, but which don’t look trashy, and are also really comfortable. Oh, and I’m a man, so they need to have extra-wide thighs. Where can I get them?”, on the other hand, I tend just to send directly to eBay. They should pay me commission).
So, the “where can I find X” emails, I don’t mind. After all, I know only too well what it’s like to find yourself desperately in need of a certain coat/shoe/dress/purse-shaped-like-a-bichon-frise, only to discover that you can’t find it anywhere. And when that happens, you will try anything, even emailing bloggers, if you think it will help light your path to The Prechus.
No, it’s the “I can’t tell the difference between someone selling an item and someone just writing about it” emails that bother me. The Fashion Police gets its fair share of these, but most of them come to Hey, Dollface, which, for the benefit of those of you not obsessively following my every move, is my beauty blog, which I use to review beauty products, write about beauty products I WANT to review, and generally worship at the altar of Sephora.
Now, back in March of this year, Heidi Klum released her own skincare line, and I totally bet she was up for weeks on end, mixing potions, gathering ingredients by the light of the full moon and chanting incantations over a cauldron, in order to produce a face cream that claims to make you look exactly like her. OK, not really, but that would’ve been a helluva lot more interesting than what I actually wrote about this event, which can be read here, but which basically says, “Heidi Klum has released a skincare line. There are face creams in it.”
(Incidentally, the only comment on that post is also good for a laugh if you’re bored.)
This morning, I received this email:
—–Original Message—–
From: XXXXXXX
Sent: 11 November 2008 01:16
To: Magic Amber
Subject: info commercial order
I ordered Heidi’s skin care line form an info commercial on Sunday October 25th 2008. The advertisement stated it was a rush delivery for no fee upgrade and would be delivered in 7-10 business day. It is now over two weeks since I ordered the product and I am still waiting for it. Please advise me on where my order is.
[Name removed to protect the guilty]
So, either this woman thinks I am Heidi Klum, in which case my life’s work is complete, or she thinks I can look inside the minds of the un-named company who sold her this product, and find out where her order is. And that I can do this without any other information whatsoever on this, not even an order number or anything. (I somehow doubt the company in question, whoever they are, only sold one product on Sunday, October 28th, and are able to track that product knowing only the name of the person who bought it). Because I am magic.
Of course, I replied to the email, letting the woman know that I have no freaking idea where her order is, or, indeed, why she’s even asking me about it, but I somehow doubt I’ve heard the last of this. After all, Thursday is a full moon, and you know what THAT normally means…
Seriously, though, I get this kind of thing ALL the time, along with slight variations on the theme, such as the company who are currently hell bent on trying to get me to bulk-buy “police gloves” from them, because they apparently believe The Fashion Police is a real police force, that is in need of gloves. Either I fail really badly at making it clear to readers that I am not a retailer/actual “police” officer, or a lot of people are… not all that bright.
I’ll let you decide which it is. In the meantime, I’m off to make myself a tinfoil helmet in preparation for Thursday’s full moon…
Tagged email fun, I am not a shop, magic amber
A couple of years ago, some cataclysmic event or other happened to my computer (clearly it was so cataclysmic all memory of it has been wiped from my mind, because I’m dammed if I can remember what it was) and I was forced to re-enter all of my Outlook contacts by hand.
Not long after this, I found out my mum was no longer receiving email from me. At all. Everyone else was receiving my messages just fine, and she was getting emails from everyone else but me (it was actually a pretty sweet deal for her, to be honest), so clearly we had a mystery on our hands.
And clearly I couldn’t be bothered investigating this mystery too deeply, or, indeed, at all, because rather than try to find out WHY this was happening, I chose to do absolutely nothing about it, and blithely continued firing off emails to my mother’s email address. This is why my childhood dream of being Nancy Drew when I grew up was never realised, obviously.
Now, my mum and I are close. I tell her things I probably wouldn’t tell other people. So it came as something of a horrible surprise when some guy in Nova Scotia contacted me to let me know he’d been receiving email from me for quite some now, and by the way, how was that rash coming along and had I ever located the source of that funny smell in the kitchen?
My mum’s name is Norma. My mystery correspondent was called Norman. You can see what I did there, can’t you?
Of course, after that, I totally learned my lesson and I was always really careful when sending email to make sure I was sending them to the right person, and not, say, sending them to be published on a national news website. Oh no, wait, my mistake: I didn’t learn my lesson at all, did I? Which is why, when my mum used the “send to a friend” function on the Sky News website last weekend to send me a link to a story, I just hit “reply”, without realising that my reply was going, not to my mum, but to the wesbite’s comment section.
Oops.
When I got a “Thank you for posting your comment on Sky News!” email a few minutes later I was, like, really confused and thought it must be some kind of mistake. And it was. But it was my mistake. D’oh.
I mean, it was an easy mistake to make. Anyone could’ve done it. Well, anyone with the brain of a gnat, obviously. And when I realised my mistake, I obviously learned my lesson for good this time, and made sure I never did the same thing ever again, didn’t I?
Er, no. Because Outlook automatically saves the email address of everyone I reply to into my address book (note to self: make it not do that any more), which now contains entries for ‘Mum’, ‘Mum – work’ and ‘Mum – Sky News’.
Guess which one I’ve been sending my emails to?
This is why, if you happen to have visited the Sky News website this week you may have noticed a long comment from me asking someone to pick me up a certain brand of face cream next time they happen to be in Tesco. You’d know it was me because, er, my full name would be on it, plus my email signature, containing links to all of my websites.
Um, sorry, Sky News! But if you could send me that face cream, that would be grand, thanks!
(Note: although I did get another “Thanks for posting a comment on our website!” email, I can’t seem to find the comment in question, so presumably someone at Sky removed it. And probably banned me, into the bargain. Which would be fair enough, under the circumstances…)
Tagged email fun, OMG internet drama!, Random Acts of Stupidity
Well, 2008 has arrived without incident. There was food. There was wine. There was karaoke. There was an email from an idiot telling me that I have a “vacuous frigid cold heart” (lack of punctuation his, I hasten to add), but that happened at the tail end of 2007, so so far 2008 remains unmarred by Stupid People, although probably not for long, knowing my luck.
And why was I told I have a “vacuous frigid cold heart” (that’s so going to be my new tagline next time I re-design this site, by the way), I hear you ask?* Because I would not let the person in question post spam on my fashion blog. When I told him this I got an email back saying:
“Nice to know the Christmas Spirit is dead in your vacuous frigid cold heart
Good luck in hell…”
Which was…nice. The guy is the owner of a website selling t-shirts. I don’t want to send him any traffic, but I promised him I’d be sure to tell everyone how totally lovely he is to deal with, so if you were to Google the words “Retro God”, you’d probably find him. Not that you’d be able to buy anything from him, though, because I’d imagine he’s probably topped himself by now, having sent me a follow up email telling me I was “ruining his life”, but that this was OK because he’d “had enough of it, anyway”. Weirdly, this melodramatic missive also included the question, “How on earth do fashion designers without a budget get noticed by you anyway?” Answer: NOT BY SENDING ME INSULTS BY EMAIL, EINSTEIN.
Anyway, that was 2007. I kind of miss it. It was the year I got married. Had my first holiday since Terry got sick. Returned to my sort-of-second-home, in Florida. Started going to the gym. Spent a memorable couple of days with orange teeth. Yeah, 2007 was a good one, alright. I just don’t think 2008 can match it, and this makes me worry about what hellish things 2008 may have in store for me. On the other hand, I guess it could have some pretty cool stuff in store, too: I’ll just have to hope that my vacuous, frigid, cold heart is up to the challenge of enjoying it all.
* Not really, but let’s pretend you care.
Tagged email fun, OMG internet drama!
GOD. As if it wasn’t enough that we have to fight them on the beaches, in the fields, streets and outside the doctor’s surgery, now the Stupid People are freakin’ EMAILING ME.
Last week this flooded into my inbox:
—–Original
Message—–
From: A stupid person ]
Sent: 03 October 2007 16:06
To: Amber McNaught
Subject: how?
how do i submit my work?
Now, on the surface of it, this may not seem too bad – until, of course, you realise that I get emails like this all the time and I have NO IDEA what these people want from me. Straight away it got my back up: I mean, did this guy’s mother never teach him how to send emails? In MY day it was the belt for us if we didn’t observe proper email etiquette: a salutation, a sign-off, correct punctuation, some clue as to why the hell we were writing to the person… Nowadays these crazy kids are all just “HOW?” As if I will know what they’re talking about. Jesus.
Well, I thought on this for a couple of minutes, but during that time I did not miraculous become involved in any kind of enterprise in which people would need to submit their “work” to me, so I wrote back an equally abrupt:
What are you talking about, dude?
In return I got this:
03
October 2007 16:11
To: Amber McNaught
Subject: Re:
how?
on a site i have
just been on it said to contact this address to ask any questions, i would like
to know ho wi submit my work onto the site
Now, this obviously helped me quite a lot, because luckily it’s not like there are millions of websites in the world or anything, is it? To be honest, though, it was news to me that one of these millions of sites was advising people to contact me (Me! Little me!) with any questions, so I asked my mystery correspondent if it wouldn’t be too much trouble to tell me which site he was talking about.
In return, he sent me a URL. Just a URL, mind. Because that’s a nice way to communicate with people. Polite. Makes you want to help them, you know? Anyway, luckily the URL was that of my infrequently-updated and actually pretty-much-forgotten-about a freelance writing blog. Which does not accept submissions of people’s work onto it, so really, we were no further forward. I brought my mighty intellect to bear on the problem before me, though, and managed to deduce that he was probably referring to the writing competition I had posted about a couple of days earlier. That would be the post which states “For more information and submission guidelines visit <clicky linky>.” NOT the post that states “Feel free to send me one-line emails trying to submit your work to me,” because that post? Doesn’t actually exist. Gah.
Sure enough, when I emailed my new friend to tell him that no, my blog does not accept writing submissions, I got back:
ok then, how do you enter the competition then?
Now, why could he not have just said that in the first place? Why could he not have just written somethinhg along the lines of: “Hi, I was just reading your blog and wondered if you could tell me how to enter the writing cometition you posted about? P.S. You rock.” Why could he not have written that? Sure, I’d still have thought he was a bit of a dumbass because the instructions are IN. THE. POST. but at least I’d have thought he was polite.
I told him to just read the post about the thing and follow the instructions in it. I didn’t hear from him again, so he’s probably off emailing other people about it now. I bet he wins that writing competition, though, if he ever works out how to enter it – talents like his don’t come along very often, you know?
And so it goes. Every week brings another email from someone who wants to know how to become a professional writer, but who has barely mastered the art of communication/ writing. Every week I have to sit on my hands to stop myself from telling them honestly what their chances are. Mostly, though, I wish they would just stop emailing me. Or would at least learn how to communicate people with something approaching manners, rather than just firing off one-line, un-punctuated emails saying “HOW?”
Tagged email fun, OMG internet drama!
Remember The Perfect People I whined wrote about last week? Well, it turns out I’m not quite done with them yet. In fact, one of them emailed me this morning. Here’s a perfect example of the kind of thing I was talking about (my comments in red):
From: A Perfect Person
To: Amber
Subject: HOW EMAIL IS RUINING YOUR WRITING
Greatings;
[Greatings? Greatings? WTF?]
I simply had to write about the article ‘HOW EMAIL IS RUINING YOUR WRITING’ that is currently the lead article on your website.
[Now be honest, you didn't have to, did you? You just wanted to. Why? Who knows!]
I was amused that the writer of the article has not attached his/her name to the article
[I am glad you were amused. I like being amusing. But to answer your point, it's my website, so you can assume I wrote it. Proceed.]
and that there were so many errors. The very first paragraph has this written in it: I don’t go anywhere without my laptop, find myself constantly making… Shouldn’t that be I find myself……
[Not really, no. Full sentence: "I don't go anywhere without my laptop, find myself constantly making reference reference to "friends" I only know from blogs, and start going through serious withdrawal if I'm away from my email for any length of time." You could say that there should be another "I" in there, but I'd say you're nitpicking just for the sheer hell of it. Oh, and FYI? We tend to use a curly symbol like this to indicate a question: ? Isn't that pretty? Say it is pretty.]
In the next paraghraph the word realize is spelled realise.
[AAAARGH! I take it you’re in the US then? Great, here we go. Did you really have no idea that we in the UK spell some words differently? Really? UK spellings tend to use ‘S’ rather than ‘Z’. This is not incorrect: it’s perfectly correct UK usage, and if you call yourself a writer then you should know that. If you don’t know that, then you’re really in no position to be writing bitchy emails to other people, and I’d strongly suggest you bear that in mind next time you decide to try and make yourself look smart. What’s a “paraghraph” by the way?]
Then there is this line: “Every time I get one of these emails, I’ll sign in frustration….” What are they signing again? Oh, right emails or maybe frustration?
[OK, ya got me there. Typos, GOD. That was really funny the way you said "What are they signing again?" though. Where do you get your one-liners from? I'll be making the jokes around here from now on though, 'kay? I am "amusing", remember?]
Here’s another questionable line: “and they sometimes don’t even have time for vowels (Poor old vowels!), missing them out altogether and writing in txt spk instead.” How about replacing missing, perhaps using the word leaving.
[How about using a question mark at the end of your question? I'm not going to tell you about this again, you know.]
Oh well I notice that the writer mentions “those old-fashioned rules of good manners and writing etiquette,” yet says nothing about using a proofing a communication,
[What's a "proofing a communication"? I mean, you're the expert here, pray enlighten me. Where would I get one of these and how would I use it?]
proper grammar or spelling. Could there be a reason for this? Perhaps the writer has become to “lazy” to use the word processing program.
[Were you too lazy to add the second "o" to that "to" there?]
I for one do not even send an email without first constructing it in my word processor program,
[Hee! What, not ever? Not even this one? Go on, admit it: you sent this one without first constructing it in your word processor program, didn't you?]
checking and reading it over. Then I paste it into the email text box. That may be the reason that no matter how much time I spend looking for freelance writing jobs I still find myself reading the work of other writers instead of writing myself.
[Or here's a thought: maybe it's because you can't spell words like "too" and "greetings" correctly?]
<Name removed to protect the guilty>
[Kudos, though, for not taking the "anonymous" route. I get a lot of that, too. I would have liked it if you'd provided a link to your website, though, so that I could provide you with some "helpful" comments. I'm all heart, me.]
Tut, tut, Perfect People, surely you can do better than this? (Note: not an invitation to try.) I’m actually quite disappointed in you: you made it way too easy for me to flame your ass off with that little missive. Having fun there in your glass houses? Better watch out for those stones!
Now, I have to admit I feel a little bit mean for publishing this here, because, in the writer’s defense, when she received my response (not quite the response given above. But almost) she immediately sent back a grovelling apology. And there’s a certain pathos to this message: the way it starts off all snarky and smart-ass, and then winds down to its sad little “no matter how much time I spend looking for freelance writing jobs I still find myself reading the work of other writers instead of writing myself.” Ah, here we have the crux of the matter, I suspect…
As I said in my response, though: if you’re going to criticise other people like that, you better be damn sure you know what you’re talking about, and you better be absolutely sure that you yourself are beyond reproach. If you don’t, then you’re just going to make yourself look stupid – or I will. And if you give it out? You better be prepared to get it back.
I know I’ve said it before, but it obviously bears repeating, so I’ll say it again: I sometimes make mistakes when I write. This is not news to me. If you make no mistakes when you write you may feel free to tear me apart as rudely as you like. I’ll obviously still think you’re an asshole for doing it, but meh, who cares what I think, right? I mean, I mis-typed “sigh” as “sign”, and God knows, no one’s ever done that before. If you suspect there’s even the slightest chance that you yourself may actually be fallible too, though, do me a favour and keep your snarky comments to yourself. Because you know me – I certainly won’t keep them to myself!
Tagged email fun, perfect people
(Yeah, I quoted Fergie in the title. Now she’s stuck in your head, isn’t she? Sorry. Please don’t hate me.)
So, you ever have one of those days? Wait, what am I saying here, of course you haven’t. You are all probably perfect people, who glide gracefully through life, never so much as falling off a bike or pouring bleach in your own coffee. For sure.
Well, I am not a perfect person, and I have had one of Those Days. I knew it would be thus as soon as I got up and discovered that I’d made a stupid spelling mistake in one of the blog posts I wrote last night (Yes, I did spell check, but it was a name I thought I knew how to spell so I let it go. Yes, I am stupid.) and that, not one, but two people had left snarky comments about it. GOD.
I should really just have gone back to bed right there. My experience with Those Days (and trust me, I’ve had a lot of experience with Those Days) is that once the first mistake has been made, others will follow, as surely as Neighbours follows the one o’clock news. And so it was. I followed up my stupid spelling mistake with one of my trademark “writing about something that’s already been covered” tricks. (Yes, I did check. No, I did not see the earlier article. Yes, I do hate myself a little bit right now, oh yes I do!) Needless to say, this was noticed and commented upon almost instantly. Go me!
Could the day get any worse? Why yes – yes it could! One headline typo, one completely missing headline, one garbled mess of a post (What was I trying to say? Who knows!) and one distorted mess of an image later, I was about fit to be tied. Luckily, all of these mistakes were ones that I noticed, and managed to correct, almost instantly, but even so. What was I thinking? (Answer: nothing. Obviously. My mind was a vacuum, a gaping void. I made Paris Hilton look intelligent today, and I hang my head in shame). What is WRONG with me? Also: Typepad? Was a b*****d. And I missed Neighbours. Gah.
I know: it was just one of Those Days. An off-day, if you will. And I should point out that I’m not normally like this. (Hi, potential clients who are reading this! Wanna employ a blogger?!) Most days I manage to only screw up once or maybe twice, not all the live-long day. The problem with this, though? Well, as a blogger, you’re not allowed to have off days. You’re not allowed to make mistakes. At all. Ever. I mean, I know we all have days like these. I know we all make mistakes. When your job involves writing on the Internet, though, you can guarantee that no mistake will go un-noticed. For every mistake you make, there’s a snarky commenter just waiting to pounce on it gleefully. And in my case? There’s two.
I can’t think of many other jobs where there’s so much pressure to be absolutely perfect at all times. Where the slightest typo or spelling error will be met with instant, public humiliation. And don’t get me wrong: I hold my hands up to the mistakes I make. I know I shouldn’t make them. I should be perfect, and I should be perfect at all times. It’s just that… sometimes I’m not. (Well, OK, a lot of the time I’m not .GOD.)
The people who leave the snarky comments, though? Perfect. All of them. I mean, they must be, or they wouldn’t feel such an overwhelming need to point out other people’s mistakes. I always have to sit on my hands when I get these comments, to stop myself typing back something along the lines of, “Thanks for the comment. By the way, what’s the address of your blog? You know, the one where you’ve never made a single mistake, ever?” Of course, the problem with that is that they’re allowed to make mistakes. They’re not writers. Writers are not allowed to make mistakes. Not even the odd typo. If you’re a writer, and you make a spelling error, God help you. You will never get away with it. At best, you’ll get a bitchy email along the lines of “Haha, you call yourself a writer, but you made a typo on your blawg!” At worst, you’ll get two.
What do people get out of this kind of thing, I wonder? I notice lots of mistakes on people’s blogs – “there/their” confusion and “should of” rather than “should have” being the two that instantly spring to mind. When I see these mistakes, though, it never occurs to me to point them out. I don’t think I’ve ever felt the need to haul out the ol’ riding boots and get up onto my high horse about it. For one, I’m scared of heights, and for two, what would I gain from it? I’d just make myself look spiteful and petty. Do these people know they look spiteful and petty, or do they think they think they’re successfully pulling off the “helpful” thing? Who knows…
Anyway. One of Those Days. Grow a thicker skin, learn to proofread better, get on with it. (Oh – and wine helps, I find…) Conclusion: I have one hell of a strange job. But I like it.
Tagged email fun, perfect people
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