I get a lot of emails from people asking for help. I generally look at the domain the emails come from. Usually it is gmail or hotmail or yahoo or comcast but there are a lot of business email addresses as well. Of those sometimes I get a good chuckle because it is from someone in a company I worked for or do work for and the people have no clue of my relation with their company[1]. Very occasionally I get one that I go “Wow!! Someone from XYZ emailed me asking for help…” Some of the occasions this has happened is with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL) and (initially) Microsoft and the FBI and Virgin (I think it would be pretty fun to work with Richard Branson) but this last week… total 10 on the Geek Meter… got an email from an IT Admin at Lucas Film Ltd… Very cool. Of course this only means something to some people, if you say Lucas Films and someone stares blankly at you… they obviously won’t understand even when you explain it. 🙂
Of course I asked if they allowed people to work from home but alas that doesn’t seem to be the case. Working for Lucas Film would be very cool though… I could start in two weeks. Seriously. 🙂
Some will recall this photo (note: small bit of photo shopping involved) of Dean-3-PO and I (Joe-2-D2) from the presentation we gave at the Directory Experts Conference in 2006 (DEC 2006).
joe
[1] I generally try to keep a very distinct separation between work and what I do personally though occasionally it can be useful to make that connection for people – especially when they don’t want to listen to me or they quote the “joeware me” to the “work me” and have possibly misinterpreted what “I” was saying[2]. Sometimes I am not entirely clear in my words and things can be taken one way or the other, I always reserve the right to clarify what I meant and telling me I didn’t mean what I meant generally doesn’t work well. 🙂
[2] I had someone do this to me on a conference call once (well a few times, but this was the funniest). I had a little bit of a debate with an admin in a company and he was pretty smart but mostly book smart… To rationalize something he was saying that I was saying was not quite right he quoted something I had written in my book and I responded saying, no I don’t think that is what was meant by that statement. The person responded back, no absolutely that is what was meant, absolutely no doubt. I nicely reiterated and said “No, I am really quite positive that that is not what was meant.” The guy came back pretty ticked because I was questioning his interpretation, ticked enough to jump to cussing and said, “How the <BLANK> would you know what was positively meant? Its not like you <BLANK> sat down and had <BLANK> tea with the guy this <BLANK> morning right?”… Several of the people on the call knew who I was and they started chuckling. I said, well to be honest, I drank orange juice this morning, I don’t much like tea in the morning and when I wrote that for the book, very likely I was drinking Coca-Cola because I was under a horrible deadline to get it all done quickly and I was constantly tired. Regardless, I know that I didn’t mean for it to be interpreted the way you are interpreting it. 🙂 We got along splendidly after that.
