I’m famous! or am I?
Has my fifteen minutes started? Already? I’m not prepared! Stop the clocks!!
I was checking my mail (not e-mail, but the paper, envelope, Royal Mail variety) this morning and I discovered a thick letter sent from somewhere in the States in my pigeon hole. Now, mail from America isn’t exactly the novelty that it used to be at one point - but this letter was sufficiently thick and from an unknown address that my curiosity was aroused. Joisey? I don’t know of any one in Joisey.
With a bit of trepidation, I opened up the letter and was greeted with several sheets of official forms and a cover letter on an expensive double sheet of paper.
Dear [Senhor Drac],
Congratulations!
It is my great pleasure to inform you that you have been chosen as a candidate for inclusion in the upcoming 10th Anniversary Edition of Who’s Who in Science and Engineering®
As it happens, I was simultaneously attempting to play Literati with Chickenbutt and eat a few sammiches. And err.. trying to read this mysterious letter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my next bite of delicious roast ham sammich went the wrong way as I choked.
[13:46] drac: I got this letter from somewhere in the US asking for bio data? WTF?
[13:46] chickenbutt: huh?
[13:46] chickenbutt: who sent it?
[13:46] chickenbutt: is it a company or some silly idiot
[13:47] drac: AHAHAHAHAHAHA
[13:47] drac: OMGWTF
[13:47] drac: OMG OMG OMFG (restrained and unfazed as always, that’s me)
[13:47] chickenbutt: what?
[13:48] chickenbutt: tell!!!
Who’s Who? Me? What? Why? Err. who? What on earth have I done now?
Nasty suspicious individual that I am, I suspected a scam. Joe Fitzsimons describes a similar event via email.
Snopes has this - not exactly the same thing but close enough. Even more interesting, a colleague with whom I cowrote a few papers has apparently gotten the same letter.
I’ve experienced conference spam - where there are emails advertising spiffy sounding conferences in various exotic locations. I get a few every week in my inbox. Read the small print and you’ll see that the conference is the worst sort of dodgy and the entry fees are exhorbitant, sometimes as much as 1000 Euros or more. Just like IJCAI and a few other conferences then, except perhaps for the dodgy part. *grin*. But this was the first time I had received actual snail mail spam. My respect for spamming as a business venture increased today. I haven’t definitively concluded that this letter is, in fact, spam - but I have absolutely no intention of being listed in a Who’s Who of anything.
My fame clock hasn’t started ticking yet.
On 17-Feb-07 at 5:49 pm,
rastiadu karaya wrote:
Come on famewhore! You know you want to, think of all the science groupies?
On 17-Feb-07 at 6:25 pm,
drac wrote:
the who? Will the science groupies reading this entry please raise a hand?
Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? No. I thought not.
On 06-Jul-07 at 3:29 am,
Joe Fitzsimons wrote:
At this stage I’ve had both the email variety and the mail variety. It’s ridiculous! There is no way I am handing over the kind of data they ask for out of vanity.