Around four years ago, a colleague of mine was murdered in a domestic dispute. He had emailed me at work the day before, and a slow network made it arrive after he’d died (albeit before we’d found out about the crime).
I thought that being dead gave you perspective. If all being dead is good for is scaring cats and rearranging curtains, then I’d rather give it a miss.
I’m hoping for knowledge of the ineffable ('cause I’d really need to know some things that I can’t eff, since I seem to spend my life finding things that I can).
Si
I had something strange happen to me on Labor Day. That morning I was getting ready to go watch the parade that was happening in my town. Before I left I checked my e-mail and found a facebook request from a friend of mine. I had created a facebook account months before but had forgotten all about it until getting the friend request from her. I approved the friend request and went downtown to watch the parade. About an hour-and-a-half later, I got a call from my husband that the same friend I’d approved the request from had been found dead earlier that morning. When I approved the request she was already gone. It was really strange afterward to visit her facebook page and see that I’d approved the request about two-and-a-half hours after she was found.
The subject calls up a niggling memory of a magazine article (Readers Digest?) from when I was maybe ten years old; it had to do with phone calls made by the dead. IIRC, the calls usually occurred within minutes after the time of death. Being a paranoid little brat who was terrified of death, I refused to answer the phone for a while after the article appeared.
Well, I sent an email to a dead guy. Does that count?
My sister lived with a guy I graduated with for almost 10 years. He died of complications from kidney failure. They had a lot of bills at the time of his death, and she didn’t have the money to buy a suit to bury him in. So I gave her one of mine.
Fast forward to about eight years ago, and I was registered on the Classmates.com website. I see that someone else from our class had newly registered on that site. Lo and behold, it’s my sister’s dead boyfriend. I sent him an email congratulating him on his recovery, and asked if I could have the suit back we buried him in. My sister and I also lodged complaints with the website’s PTB, and that account was canceled fairly quick. But I never received a reply email.
One of the last things John F Kennedy Jr did before leaving his office on Friday, July 16, 1999 was to e-mail a co-worker, who got the message the Monday morning after JFK Jr’s death.
Our work email is, and has been for years, plagued by viruses or malware or whatever you call it; every day all of us get a bunch of emails that purport to be from co-workers but really aren’t. Like the sender will be Marlitharn Lastname and the subject line will say “Important! Please read!” but when you open it up it’s from that poor destitute Nigerian guy who keeps begging everyone for help.
So a few months after my supervisor passed away, one of my co-workers opened her inbox and found a new email from the dead lady. It was spam, of course, but it still gave her quite a turn - especially because the subject line said something about Snoopy, and this co-worker was a huge Snoopy fan.
<cue Twilight Zone music>