For a while now, I have been getting the strangest emails. They concern golf rules, carpenter bees and CPR short courses I’ve not signed up for at local fire departments I could not place. I have been on the receiving end of a round-robin addressed “to all the stoners”.
The explanation is that I share my name – and therefore a similar email address – with a stranger half way round the world from me. Random email is the bane of everyone’s existence; I could tell you how many actual thousands of unread messages I have, but no one needs more pain. What does alleviate it, though, is any inkling that a real person may be present – and there is something fascinating about discovering people who share our name, as though we are connected by something more than pure coincidence.
