Color me red

I have been in the process of switching over verrrrrrrrry gradually from my AOL email address to my new, improved Gmail one. I think I might expedite the process from here on out though. I did a stupid thing today with a little help from AOL.

First, let me back up and explain that I am the membership chair this year for our International Group. That means that I keep our membership records in a handy dandy spreadsheet and send out mass emails (all BCC'ed so as to protect everybody's addresses) alerting members of club events. I've been doing email for almost 15 years now without doing anything too stupid, so I would appear to be perfect woman for the job, wouldn't I?

I am also a member of an unofficial group of moms from across the country (the "invisible friends" I occasionally refer to) who post together on an Internet message board. We met on AOL and jumped ship to World Crossing at some point and have recently moved to yet another Internet location, more secure than Dick Cheney's secret bunker, when World Crossing started going down the tubes. There's been a fair bit of off-board chatter via email about the permanent fate of the board, which was filling up my AOL inbox. One of the members pointed out that with Gmail, all emails are kept in one tidy thread, and I thought, "Wow, that's a good point." So I replied all to that message and included my Gmail address and sent off the sentiment that "AOL is really pissing me off right now. I could duct tape AOL and WC together and toss them both off a bridge." Can you tell where this is going?

For reasons known only to AOL, when I created the distribution list for the International Group, that became the first default autofill option when I type in my Gmail address. So naturally I sent that message not only to my invisible friends but also to 35 disinterested people who are probably wondering who this WC person is that I'm making death threats against. Gulp!!!

I've done damage control as best I can. I sent out a message to my invisible friends to please for the love of all that is holy don't reply all to any more of those emails. And I sent a quick email out to the club apologizing for the misdirection.

I HATE feeling stupid though! I go out of my way to avoid the stupid!! So this is really eating away at me. I'm sitting here watching my AOL inbox as the occasional "um, I don't think I was supposed to get this" message trickles in.

It's not the stupidest thing that anybody did today though:



And it's not like I'm running for vice president and had to have Charlie Gibson explain the Bush doctrine to me in front of millions of viewers last night, right?

Still I'm feeling rather sheepish right now. Bah!

(Thanks to Dawn for trying to cheer me up with that awesome dancing bear photo!)