I got an IM this
Posted by: Liz | From: July 28, 2004
I got an IM this morning from someone I didn't know. I used to have an aol account, making my screen name the same as my email name, making it much more common for random people to find me and spammers to spam me. But this morning's IM was especially strange, because it is my work IM name, which is relatively new, only known by a handful of people, and not linked to anything else. Even more strange, the first thing the person asked me was "Who are you?" It is a confusing thing to be asked who you are by someone who you not only don't know, but don't know how they found you. I of course asked who they were, and they wrote back that I didn't know them. But could they ask me a question about submitting a book query. Still having no idea how this person got my IM or why they thought it was an appropriate way to find an agent, I quickly dismissed them with a couple links to some "find an agent" sites.Weirdess was starting to abate when I got yet another IM. This person identified himself as "mike" when asked, but then got angry when I wouldn't tell him my name. Charming. He proceeded to write tell me who you are! over and over again, which comes off as very crazy, but a bit violent, too. Now, cognitively I can understand that this person is addressing me over a computer, but I all of a sudden got real panicky and needed to get rid of him. Like right away. I tried blocking him, but something wasn't connected right or something and it wouldn't let me. So, your brilliant friend here decided that so far "Mike" wasn't proving to be a real bright bulb and that maybe I could get rid of him using the internet version of "What? you're cutting out! I'm going through a tunnel grshshshcrcshshshsshshshshhh." I wrote THIS USER HAS BLOCKED YOUR MESSAGE.
Yes, I see now how retarded this is so I thank you very much for pointing that out. I got the co-worker on the job and we figured out how to get rid of him. In any case, ol' Mikey wasn't fooled, and the last question he managed to get across was if I was "in agent 4 books," by which I will assume he was asking me if I was an agent for books (and not in Agent 4 Books, whatever that might be). I'm totally baffled as to how these people found me and Google isn't offering up anything I can find. I'm all ears if you have any insights.
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