Hmmmm, they got the coal miners out. Good.
Well, not a lot has been going on here in Wyrmworld. I’ve been recovering from the labyrinthitis and going to work, that’s about it. And this weekend I’ve been doing all the cleaning I should have been doing while I was sick. Fun.
So I’ve decided to fall back onto something I’ve been holding in reserve for just such an occasion, and will now ramble on about amusing email addresses.
A few months ago one of our clients (who for no particular reason I shall refer to as “Bisby”) asked us to go through and “de-duplicate” their email database. This is a fancy way of saying “remove the hundreds of duplicate entries we put in by downloading the database, then re-uploading it without deleting all the original entries”. As we (foolishly) assumed that no one would ever be this stupid, we hadn’t actually programmed in a way to do this automatically, so Bevan and I had to sit there for a good three hours clicking a list of duplicate email addresses to remove them. To make matters worse Dale hadn’t bothered to actually check how many duplicate entries there were before phoning up and telling us to do it, and blithely told Bisby it would only take about twenty minutes. So we ended up charging 20 minutes for six man hours of work, which left no one very happy.
However as I waded through my section of the list I started noting down some of the more amusing email addresses to keep myself from going mad from boredom. And it is upon these that I now plan to ramble.
(To preserve privacy all the addresses here have been altered to point to the fictional “example.com”. If you really want to contact any of these freaks though, you could try pointing them at some of the more popular free web-based email systems and probably have a good shot at getting through. But you didn’t hear that from me 🙂
Some people use their email addresses to announce a strongly held personal belief, a creed or mantra they live their life by. I can sort of see the point of this, although you have to wonder if cabbageisevil@example.com and committment_sux@example.com do. It could be worse though. Not content with a simple descriptive email address, some people seem determined to inflate their egos. You can’t for instance tell me that bigger_than_ben_hur@example.com, huey_the_legend@example.com and jem_the_superhero@example.com are particularly modest folk. manwiththemojo@example.com may be excused for his excess, only however if he can prove that the mojo is in fact in his possession. A much more realistic self assessment I’m sure is that of ben_the_smeg@example.com.
Rhyme and alliteration are perennial favourites. blerkenderken@example.com may or may not mean something in German, but it sure sounds amusing. As does jiminijumanji@example.com, which may belong to an obsessive Disney/Robin Williams fan. persephonespride@example.com shows us that race horses have now joined the information revolution, as have some of their by-products, as evinced by crispy_dung@example.com.
Talking of the animal kingdom, it always offers some creative opportunities. parrothead@example.com for example. Or crazyflyinggoat@example.com who may or may not be a friend of holyflyingcows@example.com. Similarly hairy_chested_brute@example.com may be associated in some fashion with hot_beastie@example.com. big_ugly_bug@example.com however is probably on their own.
Still on the subject of animals we come to m_horsepower@example.com. While it is possible that there is a Mr or Ms M. Horsepower out there, I think it’s more likely that the owner of this address is having us on. As is onetonrat@example.com, the largest examples of rats known to modern science coming in at two or three kilograms maximum.
frog_brigade@example.com. I like this one. I have a vision of Wehrmacht soldiers pinned down in a foxhole in France. One of them peers tentatively over the edge and recoils in horror yelling “Achtung Sergeant!! Es ist die Froschbrigade!!!“. Sure enough, the British Special Forces Frog Brigade jumps into view, mounted on their giant armoured frogs! The Nazis flee in terror, their lines in disarray! C’mon Spielberg! Saving Private Ryan II!
Ahem, continuing down the list we come to a possible member of the Frog Brigade in pearl_frog@example.com. Although it is possible that this address belongs to a woman called Pearl and unfortunate to be born with the family name Frog.
Continuing study of the Bisby database reveals that the gothic contingent is well and truly alive on the web. This is evinced by such addresses as buried_alive33@example.com, dark_silence69@example.com, sacrificemysoul@example.com and leprosy_head@example.com (it’s slightly frightening that at least 33 people out there want to be known by the epithet “buried alive”). On the slightly more sophisticated side of Gothicdom we encounter lord_penteguire@example.com (to be fair the good lord may not actually be a goth, but with a name like that what are the odds? He might as well have called himself Hecubus).
And of course where you have goths, you have sci-fi fans. Although Bisby seems to have attracted some rather peculiar examples. droid_hurter@example.com for example is probably not the kind of person you’d want to meet down a dark alley, be you a droid or not. Given that Pluto is a frozen iceball, drummerfrompluto@example.com can be safely assumed to have possess non-human biology. As does (we presume) nitronium_blood@example.com. To the best of my knowledge nitronium is not yet an accepted entry on the periodic table, although research continues.
I leave the final comment on all of these addresses to one remarkably sensible Bisby subscriber. getalife@example.com.
