Nah’msayin?

Addressing the Problem

Graphic Josh Barkman

Alex Lewis Manley, if you’re out there, this means war.

I’m sick and tired of you, Alex Lewis Manley. You live, I have deduced, in Swansea, Wales. (I Facebook-stalked you.) You’re 18, or something, and you like to order things on Amazon.co.uk. Stupid things, like iPhone covers, and jeans and beads. Lay off it, already, Alex Lewis Manley.

I know all these things because you told Amazon.co.uk that you were reachable via my email address. Let me tell you something, Alex Lewis: You are not. Only I am reachable via that email address. That’s usually how email addresses work, I think.

Whatever email address you have is a different one, and I really have no idea how you confused it with mine. They insist that you enter your email address two times when signing up for stuff like this for the exact purpose of preventing things like this.

Do you know what that means? It means that all of the rest of us are typing out our emails two times for no reason. Because the people that feature is supposed to ferret out are immune to the good intentions behind it, apparently, too dumb to even know what their own email addresses are.

You’d think something—like the lack of confirmation emails for, like, any of his purchases ever—would have tipped him off by now. I suppose not.
What a fun life he must lead—he orders a product, like a pair of G-Star 5620 3D Tapered Men’s Jeans Medium Aged—and it magically arrives, without anything in the interim. It’s like he time-traveled back to the ‘50s.

Now I am many things, but I’ll be God-damned if I’m a man who’s typing out his email address two times whenever he signs up to order things off the Internet so that another man can flaunt the basic underlying logic of that debilitatingly frustrating gruntwork and make the whole affair seem ridiculous.

Alex Lewis Manley, you and your personalized iPhone cover spam can stuff it. Next time I get an email for you I’m going to sign up for Amazon.co.uk and start sending do-it-yourself Vajazzling kits to your house.