Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Blogiverse non-awesomeness

Dear Internets,

Sometimes I am not the brightest tool in the package of lightbulbs.

This is one of those times.

A week or so ago, some guy I'd never heard of emailed me to ask me if I wanted to buy the domain jamieann.com.

"Jamieann.com?" I thought. "Surely someone is not trying to steal JamieLovely's internet identity?"

I checked jamieann.net. All seemed normal.

Mistake the first
I did some thinking. "Jamie's readers number in the thousands," I thought. "This guy probably saw my blog, realized that I blog for ten or so people (on a good day), and figured he could scam me out of a credit card number."

Mistake the second
"I'll show him," I thought. "I'm not falling for this."

Mistake the third
I archived the email and promptly forgot about it.

Fast forward to about an hour ago. Lovely Jamie tweets that someone bought her domain name out from under her.

She is freaking out.

I feel an awful sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

"I don't know how to say this..." I start to write.

****

I feel AWFUL. Forwarding that email to Jamie with a quick, "Um, hey, WTFBBQ girl, everything OK w/your domain?" would have taken mayyyyyybe 5 seconds.

I think ultimately, I didn't forward the email because Jamie is kind of a big deal. What would she think if I emailed her out of the blue? What if all 5,000 of her blog readers/Twitter followers got the email? Surely one of them would have said something if it was legit. Worse, what if it wasn't legit? I'd look like the kind of girl who'd send money to get a Nigerian government official out of jail.

I didn't want Jamie to think I was some hayseed blogger who doesn't understand how the Internets works.

(Um, yeah. That worked out really well for me.)

The moral of this story is that the Internet is kind of like real life. Sometimes, you have to have the huevos to risk looking foolish or to talk to someone who intimidates you. Otherwise, you may end up being the person who was too distracted to save someone a lot of heartache.

Don't be a Jane.

2 comments:

Elizabeth said...

What a fiasco--I would have thought it was a scam spam too. Not cool scammer, not cool.

angelasw said...

I'm sure she'll forgive you and it definitely looks like you've learned from the experience, so it's ok.