Spam party

If you know me, I probably spammed you. Anyone who I’ve emailed in the past 20 years just received a party invite from me, except it wasn’t from me. It was from some hacker who got ahold of my email. First the automatic replies came in—8, 9, 10, 11, one after the next, people I hadn’t spoken to in years, telling me they no longer use this email address and would I please direct my email to another. I knew right away what had happened, but I didn’t know how to stop it. Next came a slew of emails and texts from people—“I’m not sure if this is real,” “My laptop seems suspicious that this is malware,” “Is this real or spam?,” “I’m having trouble opening this invite,” “I can’t seem to open this,” “It wouldn’t open for me.” From a friend in New Mexico: “I couldn’t open your invite but, obviously, can’t join whatever it is.” One woman simply asked to be “removed from this list.” Her name didn’t look familiar, so I clicked on it to discover I’d emailed her, just once, in 2008 about a Craigslist ad. I’d wanted to rent a barn from her to host a DIY art show. What shocked me was not that I’d been hacked but that all these people thought I’d invited them to a party. Maybe they’d imagined a housewarming or a picnic, maybe something more akin to that art show in a barn or a van party where we’d all caravan somewhere. I have no idea, but the irony was the spammer had inadvertently put me in touch with a bunch of random people, and it uncannily felt like being at a party where you run into people you haven’t seen in 10, 15, 20 years, like a reunion or a funeral. One woman, an artist in Frederick and honestly the most upbeat person I’ve ever met, said, “Well, it was such a pretty spam!” When it all died down, I was left with that feeling of having hosted an actual gathering—a wave of people, come and gone.

Sorry about the spam.

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