Download the audio version of today’s Dollop here
I checked my emails. I was still in bed. This was another of my delaying tactics to gain me a bit longer before I got up. I’ve already checked Twitter, Facebook, The Guardian and the Huffington post, replied to Dollop comments from my adoring fans – hello by the way. I also checked my emails when I originally woke up, but that was over an hour ago, so I should really give the inbox another quick check, and then I’ll definitely get up, I reasoned
I opened my new email. “Morning David, Alex here, just to let you know that we are ready to implement faze two. Details below. I look forward to your response, plus any news you have about the villa.” Ah, that’s nice, excellent news, good old Alex. Hang on, who is Alex? And what does he mean by “faze two?” Is he referring to my Dollop from a few days ago entitled Eaglebot Faze One, where I suggested that there are so many recordings on the Internet of me speaking – with this daily blog and such – that if I ever found myself in a similar situation to Steven Hawking then I could have a specially programmed voice which would be my actual voice, rather than the synthetic Steven Hawking voice. This would also be rather practical, especially when I’m communicating with any of my blind friends, as they would know that it was me talking, rather than getting confused and thinking that they were chatting to Steven Hawking. Maybe Alex was a computer programmer who had gotten to work on this project, uploading recordings of my voice saying various words into the database, and now he’d reached the stage where he was ready to implement faze two, what ever that was, but it sounded exciting, almost as exciting as an anecdote about socks (see yesterday’s Dollop).
I was a bit puzzled by the line, “I look forward to your response, plus any news about the villa.” If this computer programmer had managed to create a prototype of the Eaglebot and send me an email about it, then presumably he was able to use the Internet, so why couldn’t he get his own football news – I assumed he was referring to aston Villa football club. Perhaps he was emailing from somewhere like China, and the government for some reason had blocked the Googling of Aston Villa, and this poor computer programmer was bereft of news about his chosen English football club. I don’t know why the Chinese government would be concerned with their citizens finding information about aston Villa, but I am merely a British folk singer and blogger; I am not clued up about Chinese Government policy, and to be honest, it wasn’t an area I wanted to be interfering in. I was unsure of how to proceed. Obviously I wanted to know more about his work on the Eaglebot, but was it worth making an enemy of the Chinese Government over?
I read the rest of the email, wondering what the “details below” would reveal. It soon became clear that the email was not intended for me, but for the other David Eagle. The other David Eagle runs something called a Design Consultancy company in stoke. It’s something to do with the design of buildings. So the reference in this email to “the villa,” was about an actual villa, as opposed to Aston Villa.
I’ve been getting lots of this David Eagle’s emails since the start of last year. It started with an email from one of David Eagle’s clients, wanting his input on some attached floor plan drawings. I emailed back to let him know that I was very ill qualified to help him in this regard, given my lack of knowledge regarding floor plans, and due to being unable to see the drawings because of being blind. I got an email back apologising, saying that he must have taken down the email address incorecctly.
But the seed had now been planted, for there were about another fifty people copied into his first email to me, and their computer had presumably saved the email address, meaning that every time someone went to email David Eagle, they got me instead. Over the next few weeks I replied to so many emails , requesting advice about various attached drawings and documents and I received a whole host of questions, and often there would be other people copied into the message, and so the chain grew, and I got more and more emails. As the weeks went on, I amassed quite the collection of confidential documents, invoices, contact details, information about business deals. I considered getting in touch with a rival design consultancy team, and seeing how much money they’d cough up for access to all this information about their competition. I kept replying to them and explaining that they’d got the wrong email address, but the emails kept coming and coming.
Then, after a couple of months of this, I finally got an email from the other David Eagle. What the email said is something I shall divulge to you tomorrow. Oh yes my friends, a cliffhanger, although to be honest, the cliffhanger is born more out of the fact that I am falling asleep at the computer, rather than it signifying anything of dramatic value to come.
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