don't take it personal

i have this co-worker who has been known to give suspect advice in the past. she has been known to ask ridiculous questions all day long about subjects varying from her job to how long it takes to drive to random places in upstate new york. occasionally she gets all worked up about something and gives everyone the silent treatment (no! please! not that). but really most of the time she talks a lot. she talks to herself, she talks to me, she talks to anyone she can get a hook into. what is fascinating is that she doesn't believe she does this. she believes she is bad at small talk and is actually very quiet and almost wall flower-esque.

so the other day she starts shrieking from her cubicle to no one in particular....
"thats just rude"
"this is getting offensive"
"who would send this to me?"

this of course prompted me to peek over the wall (against my better judgment) and inquire what all the fuss was about. i was expecting a story about a ridiculous insured, or and agent with their head screwed on backward or a nasty-gram from an underwriter. she calls me over and says, "read this". i walk around the wall to see this horribly offensive.....

SPAM FILTER

yes folks, she was reading her spam filter looking for wrongly flagged messages and was really, truly and authentically offended by such subject lines as:
"you have a stupid face"
"think i am hot"
"wanna make it bigger for her"

i then had to explain that the messages were in fact spam and no they did not have pictures of her and no they did know who she was and that i had also just deleted about 30 of the same messages from my spam filter.

normally one would expect someone to be embarrassed about this kind of mistakes, but i think she actually became a rather hurt that she wasn't quite as important as she thought she was.

i guess now i know why spammers continue to send messages like this out. i couldn't for the life of me imagine who -especially in an office setting- would be clicking and following links from such emails but now i guess i know who.

maybe next week we will start to get the silent treatment again.

***in an update to this post (which i had written just not published yet) today the very same thing happened with another coworker of mine. someone else was really offended by the "stupid face" messages. wild.