Adventures in Sarahland

This weekend, from Friday through Sunday, I was blessed with not having to deal with school. I didn't even have to think about it. Nope, not even a little tiny bit. So to celebrate, I stayed as far away from my laptop as possible. This is when the fun sets in.

I'm sure most everyone is familiar with distribution lists. If you have a job with email or attend a school with email, you are no doubt part of a distribution list. In case you aren't familiar, I'll explain: a distribution list is an email address within a domain (in this situation @sienaheights.edu) that an administrator can add certain contacts to manually or by using specific criteria. In this case, the distribution list in question contained all of Siena Heights University's seniors.

We still haven't gotten an official announcement yet from the school as to what exactly happened, but here are the facts as they occured:

• Thursday Night: I get an email to join a group in Facebook for SHU seniors. I'm in the network and my graduation year is set, so anybody in SHU's network on Facebook can see that I'm a senior. Not difficult. I don't care, so I delete the email. No doubt this request/email goes out to other Facebook users.
  
  
• Saturday Night: Somebody, presumably an employee at Siena Heights, decides to use the seniors' distribution list email to create a Facebook account, perhaps to have something to do with the previously mentioned Facebook group. This was obviously not thought through, since the emails to said email address will go to every singe SHU senior. This is confirmed when a ton of people get an email confirming that our Facebook account has been set up.
  

Corollary: At this point, a few seconds of thinking (that's not even an entire minute) will lead someone to realize what has happened here, and that the best course of action is to simply delete the email. The person in question will figure out what they did and correct the problem, and life will go on. I delete said email and close the laptop.

• Sunday Afternoon: Although I do not have school to worry about, I decide to check my email. I open my laptop and my gmail notifier politely informs me that I have 43 unread emails. This is amazingly high! I open up gmail and find 43 emails from other SHU students who thought the best course of action was to reply to the email they received from Facebook stating one of the following things: I don't have facebook and don't want it, please remove me from this list, this is a work email and I don't appreciate all the emails, etc.
  
  
• Sunday Night: Someone sends the following email: "Could people stop replying to , I don't need 100 emails a day from people complaining about getting 100 emails themselves." A nice attempt, really, but the general public is stupid and unless they fully understand why, they won't stop.
  
  
• Monday Morning: Case in point, I have 10 more emails when I get to work at 7 this morning. One is from Facebook, confirming the deletion of the account that started this whole disaster (this marks the milestone of 2 emails from Facebook sent to this address and thus all of SHU's seniors). SHU has obviously corrected the problem. However, the distribution list still exists, and as people arrive at work on Monday and start checking their emails, they start replying all the way back at the beginning of this disaster. After receiving about 20 more emails, I send out the following:
  Subject: Everybody stop replying to any email you get
  "Look, this isn't a hard concept. Somebody created a Facebook account using the email address which is an email address that forward to SHU students. Every time you reply to these emails or to anyone who replied to one of those emails, you're sending the email out to other people. Actual emails from Facebook accounted for 2 messages. The other 50 some were because everyone wouldn't just ignore the messages. They've obviously corrected the problem because the Facebook account has been deleted. So if everybody could just use their brains and ignore the emails and STOP REPLYING, then nobody would have a ton of unwanted emails in their inbox.
  Simple concept. STOP REPLYING!!!! Delete and carry on with your life."
  
  
• 5 minutes later on Monday Morning: One lone email, sent to me only, stating the following: "You should run for President."