It started years ago. An email from the “Wonder City Running Club.” A long e-mail. Coming events. Reports of past events. Pictures, endless pictures.
So not being much of a runner, and having decent knee-borne arthritis, I clicked on the “unsubscribe” button.
But the next day and the day after that, and practically every day after that, there was a letter from the folks at Wonder City, which is in a far away state.
So I wrote a “personal” email to them, asking them to please leave me alone.
They replied that they had no record of my email address and if some “friend” was forwarding it and to please contact that friend.
I don’t have a lot of friendships with runners, football people, soccer people, baseball people, gymnasts,
marathon cyclists or, for that matter, gym rats of any kind. And there was no evidence that anyone I knew was forwarding me all this nonsense.
Each day, I would dutifully unsubscribe. And each day I would get the same return schpiel. Even marking their stuff as spam didn’t help.
But as luck would have it, I found the name of a real person with a real email address. Call her Kellie Fastfeet.
I wrote her the usual plea to get taken off the list, and then added:
“...so if you continue sending me these things each day or so, I am going to reply to every one of them with the news of the day. For example, we had a lot of rain here last night, a couple of passing thundershowers, but nothing as bad as Seattle or Baltimore or Pittsburgh.
“And if I hear from you tomorrow I’m going to tell you all my secrets about getting good stuff at bargain prices at the Wal-mart produce department.”
About half an hour later, I get a note: I found your email address in our database and taken you off the list.
I’m going to miss Ms. Fastfeet and all the latest from Wonder City and its runners. But that’s the price one has to pay for being a counter stalker.
Shrapnel:
--Here’s another word that needs a vacation: “curate,” and its variants. It is not synonymous with “collect.” You can’t curate expired pharmaceuticals, hardware, or wood chips.
--Late reports indicate Robin Williams had Parkinson’s Disease. With any luck, this will put to rest the speculation about what caused him to kill himself. And it will spark a new round of tributes.
Radio Shoutout: Each time a post duplicates an A.M. radio frequency, we salute it. This time, it’s WALK, a 500 watter at dial spot 1370 in Patchogue, New York on the south shore of Long Island. More fish than people in its transmission pattern. No real format. But a long history... and off and on for decades the radio home of friend and competitor Jack Ellsworth who recently passed and one of the last… um… curators of the Great American Songbook. His book is available on Amazon.
I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment