17th Mar 2005
Poor Bunny
Email scares me. Here’s the background story:
A couple of weeks ago, Adrienne came across the site SaveToby.com. It’s a well designed site with lots of pages and pictures of an adorable small rabbit. The homepage copy reads, in part:
Toby is the cutest little bunny on the planet. Unfortunately, he will DIE on June 30th, 2005 if you don?t help…. [Context describing how the anonymous author found the rabbit wounded under his poarch and nursed him back to health.] Unfortunately, on June 30th, 2005, Toby will die. I am going to eat him…. I don’t want to eat Toby, he is my friend, and he has always been the most loving, adorable pet. However, God as my witness, I will devour this little guy unless I receive 50,000$ USD into my account from donations or purchase of merchandise.
It’s a rather hilarious site in its sick, anonymous Internet prank kind of way. Photos of the rabbit in a cooking pot, on a cutting board next to a knife with worried thought bubbles, recipies for rabbit dishes, etc.
When we first checked, it appeared that site visitors had sent, in addition to a gallery’s worth of hate mail, something like $12,000 in PayPal donations. So the other day I checked and saw that they’d only risen to $18,000. I emailed Adi and said something to the effect of “It’s not looking good for Toby.” She replied pointing out that when you actually clicked the PayPal link now, you are greated with this on PayPal’s site: “Error Detected: This recipient is currently unable to receive money.”
Yikes. The clock’s ticking. What is PayPal trying to do, guarantee a death sentence for the creature?! So I wrote back an email that said simply “Poor bunny.”
The next morning a female colleague wrote me expressing suprise and perhaps a bit of concern as to why I had written her a note in response to a business issue we had been discussing that read simply “Poor bunny.”
I was able to forward her a chain of emails back and forth with my wife and reference SaveToby.com quickly enough that I trust she believes me. She also happens to have a good sense of humor, so as far as I know she hasn’t reported me to HR for harrassment.
But the incident was so random (how on earth did I do that? a renegade, unexamined cut and paste, perhaps?), it could have just as easily gone to our CFO or head of legal or whomever. Or maybe it has. I seriously started to worry about whether I should look back through my entire Sent Email box to see what other non sequiturs that could easily be grossly misconstrued I may have sent in recent weeks to any number of colleagues, clients, vendors, etc.
For the time being, I’m just keeping my head down and trying to plow on, though with a moment’s pause before hitting “Send” a bit more often.
Thankfully, I bear in mind it could have been much worse.
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Well you got lucky It really could have been much worse. Well if you have checked out savetoby.com I guess imitation is the best form of flattery because many people are doing it.