Yesterday I got a curious, one-sentence email to the customer support address for my WordPress plugin with the subject “checkout” [sic].

Just wanted to confirm if everything went through.

The person had a weird* — but not too weird — name, and a Gmail address to match. I was immediately suspicious, but since there were no links in the email, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt as just being a bad communicator, not a phishing attempt. I figured the worst I risked by replying was proving my email address was real, which… well, duh. So I tersely responded that there were no orders matching their name or email address.

This afternoon I got a reply:

I regret my mistake in not attaching the required files to my previous email, as I was unaware that our email system does not support large file attachments. With some assistance, I have now uploaded them to my OneDrive at [redacted] Sorry for the late response.

Don’t worry, I wasn’t stupid enough to click the link. I just blocked them and reported the phishing attempt instead. I’m glad my instinct was right, and I kind of wish I hadn’t felt the need to test it. I suspect I’m going to need to be extra vigilant about incoming emails for a while.

I definitely regret that — out of necessity — I replied with my real email address, but the support email for the plugin is just a forwarding address and can’t send email directly. Maybe it’s worth the $20/year it would take to change that.

*I feel compelled to explain what I mean by “weird,” because people can say someone has a weird name and basically mean something racist by it. That’s not the situation here. The surname was a very common English surname. The first name was the name of an animal that I have never heard used as a person’s name before.

Just putting this nonsense word here as a bit of an experiment.

Today, with some help from SLP, I hatched a new scheme (can schemes be hatched?). OK, not really a scheme. A new blog. 52 Coffees.

We were sitting at Caribou in Highland Park, discussing the merits of working from a coffee house (at least, one with free WiFi). I idly suggested I should do it once a week, visiting every Caribou in the metro area. She upped the ante and lowered the lameness quotient by suggesting that I only visit independent coffee houses (at least, ones with free WiFi). And blog about it.

So that’s what I’m going to do. Starting next week. I may seek some assistance from Google Maps to locate all of the coffee houses in Minneapolis and St. Paul and visit them sequentially in an radiating pattern from our home. Or I might just randomly visit them. Or a mix of both. I’m not sure, and I’m even less sure you care. But the point is, I’m starting next week, with Minnehaha Coffee. Be sure to follow the blog. And I’ll try to get rid of the default WordPress theme soon, I promise.

(Found at Daring Fireball, of course. More at the online remains of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. With a name like that, no wonder they went bankrupt.)

(The title of this particular rant is, of course, the line spoken by a smart-ass bratty kid in a 1980s TV commercial for some kind of air freshener product, or possibly that powder you shake onto the carpet and then vacuum up. Her mother had cooked fish for dinner, and then attempted, futilely, to cover the stale cooked-fish smell with a “rosy” spray air freshener, prompting this clever quip from her daughter. If you can identify the product it was for, please let me know! The mystery was solved… see updates below.)

I hate the smell of cigarette smoke. It was around me perpetually when I was growing up, and while I bear absolutely no grudge against my parents or my deceased grandparents as a result, I still find the smell highly objectionable.

I know I am not alone in my dislike of this smell. How can I be, when so many people — especially women — attempt to cover their own smoke smell with generous dousings of perfume and/or cologne? Here is the crux of my rant for today.

I work on the 25th floor of an office building, and I typically park on the 6th floor of its parking deck. (For my friends back in Minnesota, that’s Southern for “parking ramp” and for those in California, “parking structure.”) Hence, I take at least four rides in an elevator daily while I am at work (my attempts to be healthier by getting off at the 20th floor and walking up five flights notwithstanding).

It seems to me that, without fail, on at least one of those rides the elevator is filled with a noxious cloud produced by the combination of cigarette smoke lingering on a person’s clothes, mixed with excessive quantities of disgustingly potent perfume applied in a feeble attempt to mask the first smell. Let me say to all of you who attempt such things (as if there’s even an infinitessimal chance that one of you is reading this):

IT DOESN’T WORK!

The perfume does not mask the cigarette smell. It just makes it worse. And believe me, it stays around long after you’re gone. So do us all a favor… quit smoking. Then you won’t need the nasty perfume, either.

Update (May 16, 2018): Wow… over 16 years after I originally posted this on a blog that predates my use of (or… come to think of it, the existence of) WordPress, I just received an email from Christine Costello, who played the bratty kid, letting me know the product was Lysol. (I hope she took my assessment of her performance the right way… obviously it made a lasting impression!)

Update (August 22, 2020): And now, over 18 years after I originally posted this, a mysterious visitor named “B.H.” shared a link to the commercial on YouTube: