Jeremy Turner’s Blog

Hi. This is Jeremy Turner. Over the past two years, I’ve received quite a few emails intended for this guy. His GMail address is one letter off from mine. When this first started happening I just deleted the messages, but as it continued I sometimes would reply and let the sender know that I was not, in fact, the Jeremy Turner they thought I was. Surprisingly nobody ever responded.

The emails sent to this other Jeremy Turner all have a common thread. They are sent from UC Davis or related domains, revolve around the the subject of UC Davis, “Aggies” alumni events, the fraternity Alpha Gamma Rho, or any combination of these criteria. I wondered if the people i replied to thought it was just him being a jerk. Was he a jerk? Did they ever confirm with him that they might have the wrong email? Maybe he was such a jerk that they’d rather not ask. I soon stopped trying to respond and just started deleting these messages when they popped up in my inbox.

Then one day I received an email with a bunch of pictures of what could only be described as “dude’s partying.” It looked like some sort viral marketing. Something about the lighting and the fact that they all had the same green beer cans in every picture made me paranoid. This paranoia was bolstered by the fact that one of the previous mistaken emails contained a full Visa credit card number for “me” to use. This was really unnerving. I could only imagine if that email was supposed to go to me and went to some stranger instead. I also quickly imagined that it was some sort of set-up. The paranoid angel sitting on my left shoulder won the brief debate with his counterpart on the right. I deleted it (almost) immediately. Was somebody that stupid to send a credit card number without being 100% sure they had the email right? My experience says “Yes, Jeremy, some people are that stupid.” Or was this the culmination of some sort of bizarre hoax, luring me in with the familiarity of these emails over the past year, lulling me into a state of vulnerability? I started collecting the emails again.

One day several months ago while scanning my email I  saw the “Mistaken Identity” folder I’ve been archiving all of this in and decided once and for all to see if this was a real person or not. In hindsight, I should have done this much sooner as it would have saved me some of the paranoid delusions that materialized in my head after receiving strangely lit photos from those who would not respond to my warnings. Almost instantly I clicked on this link. Alpha Gamma Rho? Check. UC Davis? Check. Jeremy Turner? Check. And his email. Right there for all of his fraternity brothers and alumni sisters to see. It’s even written in camelCase to neatly point out the middle initial “R” in his name. This was way too easy to find and I am still kicking myself for not doing this much much sooner. What to do now.

Several months have passed since I found this link to Jeremy Turner. Last night I finally bit the bullet and emailed him regarding this situation, quickly summarizing what had been going on and giving him a list of email addresses of his friends and colleagues that had his address wrong. I also offered to forward him the emails I still had archived. To my surprise he emailed me back this afternoon and was extremely apologetic and asked to have those emails forwarded, so I did. Tiny weird mystery solved rather quickly and painlessly.

When I started this blog I had a snarky, wise-ass post already written about this situation. Considering how things have turned out I decided to write this one instead. Jeremy if you are reading this, please post a comment and tell me what your middle name is. Thanks!

This post is tagged Aggies, Alpha Gamma Rho, Blogging, Davis, dude, google, Google Presence, Identity, Jeremy, Jeremy Turner, Mistaken