all talk and no action

A long time ago, when I worked at another publishing company, a bunch of people in the office played five-a-side football after work. To co-ordinate this, and to invite new people to play, the organiser would send out three or four emails every day with the subject header “footie!” and a message along the lines of “five-a-side footie this week, anyone want to play?”

After a week or two of these annoying emails, I decided that it would be a really smart move to set up an auto responder, so that any email arriving with the subject header “footie!” would result in the sender receiving a reply that said “f**k off, I hate football” and eventually I’d stop getting the mails.

You can see where this is going already, can’t you?

All was going swimmingly, until a few days later, when an eager reader decided to mail me to let me know about his new football web site – with the subject header “footie!”. What are the chances of that?

Checking my email that day, I watched as the progress bar showed my mail downloading. And then I watched again in horror as my email program replied to this unfortunate reader with my carefully crafted reply. A hastily written “I’m sorry if you received a strange email, it looks as though I have a virus” did no good – that was the last I heard from him.

So if you email me with an obvious question and it takes a while for me to reply, you’ll know why. But at least you know you’ll receive a personally written response, and that it won’t be full of insults.

Haha, that's brilliant.