It Sucks Being David Grant

Because my name is so common I get at least 5 e-mails a month from people who think they are e-mailing a different David Grant. I sometimes get poked on Facebook by people who think I am a different David Grant. While I was in grad school in Waterloo, ON I got mixed up with a different David Grant many times and I was even awarded his scholarship by accident (it was rectified). Someone once ordered some products on the UK equivalent of BestBuy and used my email address (accidentally) so I received all the receipts, shipping notifications, etc... I sent him a snail mail letter informing him of his mistake. Recently a Dr. David Grant in Toronto used my email address in his Aeroplan (frequent flyer miles) account. I started receiving his monthly statements by email. The only way for me to find out who he is was to use the "I forgot my password feature" and change it. After doing that I found out his mailing address but I have yet to inform him. He has like 300,000 Aeroplan miles which I think is worth about $3,000 but I can't remember.

Getting e-mails from people who think I am a different David Grant is what bugs me the most. My inbox is almost completely free of spam. All my subscriptions to mailing lists are properly filtered into different labels (for those of you who don't know what I mean by a label you don't deserve to find out) so any email that appears in my inbox is usually important and is something I care about (by design). So when I get these "spams" from people who think I am a different David Grant it really pisses me off. The worst is when the email is to a large group of people and someone hits the reply all button. This usually sets of a chain reaction of reply-alls leading many people to have my email address in their address book, causing them to spam me at a later date.

I sometimes have a little fun with it. Once somebody emailed about 5 people (including me) some family photos. I chatted it up a bit and made some funny comments about the photos before letting them know that they had the wrong address, explaining that I thought I knew them but I was mistaken. Another time someone emailed me inquiring about a place to rent (that I knew nothing about). I replied that I needed to see photos first. The person sent some photos and I replied "I'm sorry based on these photos I just can't take you." I have gotten several work-related emails as well. My email address domain is telus.net so I got some emails from telus employees thinking they had emailed a felow employee. I think the company's employees use telus.com. I haven't done that in a while but maybe I should start doing that again. It could be fun.

On the plus side, being David Grant means I will always be somewhat anonymous. At least more anonymous than others will less boring names.