Sometimes, due to where I work, I get random email that’s really meant to be targeted to scientific researchers. Today I got a ‘Free Transgene Vector with Transgenic Mouse’ purchase offer, with additional information on bespoke mouse genome modification services.
I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve seen the word ‘bespoke’ in reference to anything other than suits. And it’s definitely the oddest email I’ve gotten (at least in my work inbox), though I suppose for biomedical researchers, it’s just another day in their lives.
Online game: I was a fairly well respected veteran (of the WWII air combat sim Air Warrior), so I often would order people around and such, point out imminent raids and so on. Those who knew me accepted my role. In my PM box after a session, got this odd email, from someone whom I did not recognize and who did not ID himself with his flight handle, who berated me for “shooting my mouth off” (I didn’t recall getting into anything remotely resembling an argument with anybody that night) and made vague innuendo about my lack of sexual prowess. I had no subsequent issues with any other pilots.
I had just finished college, where I had learned digital animation and video stuff like editing and the like. I got an email congratulating me on my graduation, etc. and if it’s not too much trouble could I finish up that video I had been working on for the sender.
I couldn’t figure out who this woman was or that I had promised her a video. I had promised other people videos, but I didn’t have anything unfinished at the time.
It took me days to figure out it was meant for a guy with my same name (my last name is rare) who went to film school and graduated in southern California the same year as me.
I can’t find it, it was in Spanish, Mexican slang actually, I got a translation here on the Dope. Someone had got onto a customer’s email account and sent a nasty message.
I get lots of spam in my personal email that’s in French. No idea why. I am not French, or French-Canadian, and I’ve never even visited France or any French-speaking country. I probably should read it just to brush up on my high school French, but something tells me a lot of those words weren’t things we learned in high school.
I got caught in a Reply to All email storm from a place that I worked contract at briefly several years ago. Considering that they treated our entire team somewhat crappily towards the end, I decided to continue the “storm” by sending another email requesting that I be taken off the list. I then moved the email and its domain to my spam and chuckled evilly.
Way back in the early days of the Internet (around '95 or so) I received a mis-delivered email from a hospital somewhere, which read along the lines of: “100mg of this medication is way too much; please reduce the dosage to 25mg.”
Can’t help wondering, even now, if that patient’s still alive or what. :eek:
In college, I received an email with the subject line URGENT SPINACH ANNOUNCEMENT.
It turned out to be an informational email from Dining Services about the outbreak of e. coli in Dole bagged spinach, and how there was not going to be any spinach available in the salad bar until further notice. After reading the email, I realized that we had a bag of the affected spinach in our apartment refrigerator and threw it out. So it was actually helpful. But that subject line still makes me grin.
In the day my sister-in-law and I communicated about once a week by email. (I say In the day because I have been blocked from using that address.)
You see, I didn’t know that she was using her work computer to write me. And one day I forwarded her a cute joke that happened to have the phrase “a shitty hairdo” in it. While that impolite word was used there was nothing else about the joke that was scatological or obscene.
Within the day I received an email from the email monitoring service her company used. It was brief and made the point that I was forbidden to mail them anything with the word shitty within the text.
The irony of that cracked me up and, still not clear that I was hearing from her company, I responded to the effect that the writer of the letter also may not send me any email with the word shitty in it. And why could they send me shitty but I couldn’t send them shitty?
At that point I guess SIL got called in for a chat with her boss and it took some ‘splainin’ and apologizing to get the relationship back on a copacetic track.
That’s got to be one of the more peculiar exchanges I’ve had. (I still think it’s funny but I’m the only one.)
I once received an email from someone saying that they were using my name as a stage name, and they hoped I didn’t mind. (They had been on another board that I was on.)
I got a couple of e-mails last year from a faculty member at the research center next door to our campus looking for people to provide samples of human diarrhea for a study he was conducting. Ew.
A stuntman call sheet and directions to a location in Atlanta for a production called “The Idiom”, which was the working title of Hunger Games Catching Fire.
Years ago, I used to have an email address on AOL that was for a project I was working on. The email address was DeathintheFamily.
I’d get a lot of emails about… well… deaths in families. I think people had meant to put “death in the family” in the subject line but put it in the to: box.
I used to work for a company focused on infertility care. My name was in a spot on the website that sometimes led to interesting emails:
One fellow offered to sell us a testicle.
One woman offered to sell us an ovary.
I am not a physician or lawyer, and our company didn’t actually provide care, so we were the wrong folks to ask. I referred them to the list of physicians they might contact.
One woman offered to sell us her eggs - she claimed to be a fashion model and marathoner, highly educated with parents who went to Ivy League schools and high-ranking execs, etc. She wanted huge $$ but *knew *she was worth it. Again, not our area, so I referred her on.
To my knowledge, nothing came of any of these, but they were interesting.
I maintain an online list of the things Bart writes on the blackboard at the start of episodes of The Simpsons. Every now and then, I get an E-mail from somebody (clearly from out of the country) wanting to buy blackboards from me and asking for a price quote. (I have a feeling that if I were to actually sell one of these people some blackboards, they would send me a phony money order, probably for an amount larger than the agreed price, with a request to send back a check for the overpayment.)
I am a biologist, so this sort of thing doesn’t make me blink - there is a target for everything. However, I DID find it odd when, for a month or so, I was getting several daily emails telling me about fantastic deals on bulldozers.
A friend of mine was working on a college campus for the Study Abroad section. After he had left his job there, his name and email remained on the email list for the employees, and one day he recieved the most hilarious and disturbing email. It was a mass email sent out to all the employees, coming from the wife of a guy who works there.
I guess she got on his computer and sent it out to everyone, she told everyone that he was having an affair with a girl who works there and gave all kinds of explicit details about their affair and all the stuff she “found out about him”. To top it all off, they were foreign exchange students from another country and the email was written with strange/slightly off sounding idioms that were hilarious. Wish I still had a copy of it to share.
Btw, this email list sent out this email to everyone, including the president/person in charge of the entire department.
For my own experience, the oddest one I got was a response from a potential employer. I was still in college and someone had given me his card for possible work interpreting. I emailed him asking if he was looking for interpreters, and the email he sent back was so odd. This guy is a nationally certified court interpreter, yet his email was strangly worded and FULL of grammatical errors, saying things like " on the friday" instead of " on Friday", or capitalizing things that don’t need it. By all means I don’t mean to criticize him, It just made his email so comical to read.
I received an email from some dude in Jamaica issuing some decree under the Jamaican constitution ordering all servants of the Crown of Jamaica and the United Kingdom, including MPs and Lords, to cease all their work and immediately begin praying for the soul of Nelson Mandela. It included a PDF of the proposed prayers, and helpfully suggested we use these prayers to the WW1 centenary, Thatcher, and the royal family.
Edit: just remembered I already posted it once: here
