John Turner

So here’s the situation…I have a pretty common name. Not “John Smith” common, but with almost 5,000,000 hits, common enough. John Smith is about 36,000,000 hits, I’m 5 million, and my good friend’s name is only 16,000. So I’d say fairly common.

Anyway, waaaaaay back in the day when GMail was just an infant, I picked up the GMail ID johnturner. I figured I was pretty lucky to get it. This was 2004-ish. 4 years is a long time in Internet time…if we were talking geology and the age of the Earth, that would be like 500 million years ago.

Apparently, there are a bunch of John Turners out there in the world that think they also have the GMail ID johnturner. They don’t, because I have it, and I’m pretty diligent about a) changing my password regularly and b) making sure I pick a good password when I do it. I’m the only person using that email address. But I get several messages a day for OTHER John Turners. Email confirmations of orders, shipping confirmations, hotel reservation confirmations, airline confirmations, etc.

So far, I know there is:

a John Turner that lives in England who buys really cheap, dodgy electronics on eBay UK

a John Turner in Australia that is apparently still looking for a good, used Subaru

a John Turner somewhere in America that owns a condo in Kihei, HI and also happens to be on the condo association board

a John Turner somewhere in the Portland, OR area that has some political leanings that definitely aren’t mine

a John Turner that recently traveled to Jacksonville, FL and stayed at a Marriott property

Somehow, all of these John Turners think they have my email address. They don’t, I am pretty sure of that. So, to all my John Turner brothers: STOP USING MY EMAIL ADDRESS.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 6:28 am and is filed under General, Pop Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.