Here’s the scene…
I finish writing an email in Gmail and hit send. But instead of sending my email Gmail serves me up a message “Did you mean to attach files?”.
Huh…what…no, why do you ask?
The message continues…
“You wrote ‘are attached’ in your message, but there are no files attached. Send anyway?”
Hey! You the nerve. Stop reading my email! Well I never..I…well..uh…sigh…
Way to remind me of the slick and slimy eyeball of Big Brother that is always casting his eye upon me Google.
Yes, yes of course I know he’s always there..poking around…pawing through my stuff…serving me up contextual advertising he’s just sure I’ll want to see. It’s the price I pay for all the free stuff I get back. A deal struck with the devil perhaps. But a fairly agreeable one most of the time.
But wow..can’t I at least pretend it’s not going on? Do you really need to remind me that you are “reading” my emails as I am writing and sending them? Do you Google…huh..huh…do you?
How icky and invasive (and ok the geeky side of me insists I add kind of a little bit awesome too) this is.
So what “are attached”?
The thing about Big Brother is, it makes everyone else feel it’s OK to be all nosey in your business.
Ha ha ha…yeah it does indeed seem like Big Brother was doing me a favor by informing me that I hadn’t attached those files I said I had. But in fact the “are attached” was referring to items attached to a email promo I had received. I was ranting at some poor CS Rep about how a promo was misleading. Yeah, I know lame. It’s the marketer in me (shudder).