Victorinox boo-boo
So, I made a blunder today. But let’s go back twenty-something years to start.
I was in love with Victorinox Swiss Army Knives from the mid 1980s. One of the (many) reasons I was looking forward to going to Switzerland with my family was my ability to purchase, in Switzerland, one of my beloved knives.
Today, I get an email from slickdeals.net advertising — what else — a top-of-the-line, $80+ Swiss Army Knife for under $35. The sale is one of their “Gold Box Lightning Sales”, which means it has a duration of minutes to hours. So I go to GMail and send out a quick email to, oh, just about everyone, telling them about the sale.
Then the proverbial X hits the Y.
It’s kind of funny to me, now, in a rather embarrassed way, the first time I’ve been reasonably accused of spamming. But yes, that’s what happened — everything from pure jest to someone seriously threatening to block my emails.
I can’t really claim any extenuating circumstances, so let this be a warning to you: if you see an awesome deal, even if you think everyone you know might be interested in it, spammers have ruined it for the rest of us, and sending out a mass email to all your friends might not be the best route to go.
Anyway, I ordered my knife, and I hope some other people were able to order knives of their own — if you’re not already Leatherman devotees or something.
And if you got the email and hated it, I’m really sorry.
Email subscription
March 25th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
My girlfriend was looking over my shoulder when I got the email you said, and she thought it was automated spam (the bad kind). I knew better, because I recognized the ‘From:’ header. In whuffie terms, it got you a -1 from me, but you had some whuffie built up being a longtime reader of your blog, so the damage wasn’t too drastic.
This reminded me of the time I sent an email to the class list for the first-year Math course in university. There were a few hundred people on the list, and I made the mistake of asking the whole list if there any more of those funny math jokes coming our way. I felt the pain of a friend telling that wasn’t cool, so I’m cool with the email you sent out as long as you feel the pain and don’t do it again.
(Besides, I’m in the market for a knife with a smaller toolset. Too much “girth” on the one you were pointing out!)
March 25th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
What is most fascinating to me about the whole ordeal is how people cleanly self-divide into two groups on the issue.
Those with much of their self-definition built around netiquette and being of the cognoscenti consider this an egregious breach of manners and good taste, and something that I should both feel guilty about and be publicly flogged over. My favorite summation of this viewpoint is “I’m cool … so long as you feel the pain and don’t do it again.”
Then there are the “normal people”, who think I was completely absurd to apologize for this action, that I was doing friends a favor by letting them know about the sale, that recipients should be thanking me, and that they appreciated the mail even if they were not in the market for the item. My favorite summation of this viewpoint is (the will remain anonymous) “If someone took offense, you need to share some meds with him, and if this is his view of spamming, fuck him!”
This cleft does not follow age, gender, racial, or economic lines. It might follow lines of hours of Internet exposure.
I’m stuck in a weird middle ground. I really did mean this as a nice thing for friends. I wrote the message hastily because, as I stated (not as a high-pressure sales tactic, but as simple fact) that there were minutes left on the sale, did not sufficiently proof-read, and sent something spammy-sounding — and had people I considered to be good friends threaten, without a trace of mirth, to add me to their list of spammers for doing so, and expecting an apology. With many of these people, I’ve built up more than a decade of goodwill, through selfless research and self-full self-expression, and they were willing to killfile or de-Whuffie me over one email.
I am in the cognoscenti. If someone beats my score of an average of 5,166 spam messages per day to deal with, please post your number. If someone precedes Summer 1995 as the date his first website went online, post that number, too. So I know WTF I’m talking about. All my adult life I worked in, with, and among computers and online culture. And I must confess, although I am fully aware that I offended nonzero people, that I think some people have their detectors set a little too high.
So my response is not “fuck ‘em” in the sense of the respondent above: that I shouldn’t give a monkey’s what the offended people think. But my response is “fuck it“: if people are too busy keeping their online noses clean, then they can go ahead and miss out on awesome sales that come my way in the future.
If you want to show your online gang colors by telling me what a douchebag I am for sending the Victorinox email, by all means, flog away. My email and this topic, as always, remain open.
March 31st, 2008 at 11:45 pm
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