Carl Staab
11/10/99
Period 4-5
And here I thought no one knew my email…

	Just two weeks ago I received a very strange email message.  Very few people know what my email address is.  It’s actually listed in the Student Directory, although incorrectly.  Virtually all that I use my email for is to send stuff to and get stuff from my dad.  I only check it every three days or so.
	So, I was quite surprised to receive an email two weeks ago from someone who I didn’t recognize.  I thought at first that it must be some weird junk email.  Well, that was too bad- it would’ve been the first junk email I’d gotten.  Then I opened up the message, and I saw that it wasn’t any sort of weird ad at all.  It was from an actual person to other actual people, not some computer mailing.  But it was from somebody I didn’t know.
	I looked closer at this anomalous email.  All it said was that this person, who I didn’t know anyway, had given out an incorrect email address.  She was sending the correct address out, presumably to all the people in her address book.  I looked down the list of other addressees.  I noticed that it started at A and only went to about D or so.  That was also kind of weird.  (I was listed as Carl Staab, in the Cs.)  The only other person on the list that I knew was my sister Caitlin.  I wondered, “How on earth did anyone get our email addresses and put them in her address book?”  So I sent my sister a message asking if she knew what this was about.  I figured that she probably didn’t, but what else could I do?
	When my sister got home and saw the message, she didn’t know who the sender was either.  However, while she was looking it up, I was looking at her email account over her shoulder.  I happened to notice a message from an uncle of ours, about a list of family email addresses, and I asked to see it.  After all, I hadn’t gotten one of these.  Caitlin then said that this mysterious sender might be one of our cousins.  I considered that, but asked why we hadn’t seen any other members of our family on the list.  Once we opened up this contacts list, I noticed that there was indeed one contact with a similar email address and the same first name as our mysterious email sender.  (Last names weren’t listed.)  With this evidence, we asked my dad, who of course immediately knew that she was one of our cousins.
	All I can conclude is that my dad sent out our email addresses to family and didn’t tell us about it.  Probably our sender just copied and pasted names and addresses (from an alphabetical address book) to the email and sent it a couple different times, resulting in our section being A-D.  It hadn’t occurred to me that we don’t really have that many Staab-side relatives with A-D first names; in any case, none of them that I know were on that list.  So, a little weirdness and the fact that I don’t know very many of my (numerous) cousins on that side of the family combined for a decent laugh, no matter how weird it was at the beginning.
	I’ll just have to make sure word of this never gets back to my cousins.