{"id":554,"date":"2025-02-03T20:40:09","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T04:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/?p=554"},"modified":"2025-02-03T20:40:09","modified_gmt":"2025-02-04T04:40:09","slug":"uncle-josh-asks-what-if-for-the-umpteenth-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/03\/uncle-josh-asks-what-if-for-the-umpteenth-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncle Josh Asks What If&#8230;? for the umpteenth time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a while since I looked at what my alternate selves have gotten up to. Some background: When Google&#8217;s Gmail product went live on 4\/1\/2004 I grabbed a coveted first-initial-last-name account. My brother wanted that account (we share an initial) but I think he&#8217;s forgiven me, especially when he reads about what that email gets up to.<\/p>\n<p>It did come in handy when I had to fly to San Jose for a business trip and my manager took us to Top Golf and we had to register for an account and I sure as hell didn&#8217;t want to have a Top Golf account so I plugged in the old email address, to be greeted as Jonathan and no way to change it that I could suss, so I explained that I was Jonathan for the session of chipping golf balls into the bar behind me.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I checked back in and found thousands of emails about various and sundry topics:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>John (my father&#8217; name, I seriously doubt this is his account as he died 25 years ago) is missing all the MyLife updates.<\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t know what job I have that uses Paycom Punchcard but I&#8217;ve been a bad boy for 242 work days straight, it looks like.\n<ul>\n<li>This may be Jim. I&#8217;m pretty sure it&#8217;s Jim. Guy needs to take responsibility for his work, man.<\/li>\n<li>However, lots of emails have subject lines of simply {{count}} so maybe it&#8217;s not Jim&#8217;s fault.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Apparently I signed up for DirectTV today.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m still attending some sort of Men&#8217;s recovery meetings in New York.<\/li>\n<li>I think I&#8217;m consulting psychics, too.<\/li>\n<li>James did something and now I&#8217;m on a bunch of email ads from one of those god-awful xt-dot-local servers.\n<ul>\n<li>I may be premature. It could have been John or James or Jacob or Jalen<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>More death notices from Capuchin Franciscans in White Plains NY.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m going to see the Sex Pistols at the Royal Albert Hall in March. Okay, Jerry is. I hope he gets his tickets.<\/li>\n<li>Jody seems to be heavily into Indian Meditation. Too bad she&#8217;s not into checking her emails.<\/li>\n<li>I got an email from the Royal Sonesta Hotel in New Orleans that is either a scam or someone got up to something very nasty in a hotel room. Honestly, I kind want to know, but only to put it in a story.<\/li>\n<li>I may have purchased a car in Floyd County GA. I&#8217;m not sure. The email was sketch.<\/li>\n<li>Cindy from Lake Taylor High wants a summer internship in Norfolk, would &#8220;like u as a reference.&#8221; That&#8217;s a hard no from me, Cindy. Sorry.<\/li>\n<li>I know damn well that I dumped my LinkedIn profile about six years ago, but I also got a &#8220;Congratulations on 14 years with LinkedIn&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m apparently driving for Turvo, which I think is in Kentucky and I think is a gigwork scam.<\/li>\n<li>I have a monthly MetroNet in Indiana but Jarrett seems to be paying the bill on time.<\/li>\n<li>I enrolled in Modern Classrooms Project&#8217;s mentor program in Chicago. Hopefully this called cleared up. Schools need our help.<\/li>\n<li>I have an official apology from Covenant Aviation Security for their people being assholes in San Francisco International Airport.\n<ul>\n<li>Wait, why are we outsourcing TSA activity to private companies?<\/li>\n<li>Oh, right. It&#8217;s the Grift.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m still getting Eirtag invoices from Ireland. I used to get VAT taxes from Ireland. Technology progresses, I guess.<\/li>\n<li>Apparently I flew from Seattle to Turkey to Saudi Arabia in December and January.\n<ul>\n<li>These also make me feel guilty. How much hassle did Jennifer have because she used a junk email address at some point?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Mackenze Scott Tuttle, claiming to be the ex-wife of Lex Luthor Stan Jeff Bezos, wanted to give my $2.5M because &#8220;my email was picked an random.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>I was invited to the Cross-Cultural Justice Ministry at the Church of the Resurrection in Washington DC, but only once so I think they sorted that out.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m still on some mailing list that is so old there are members still promoting the &#8220;please don&#8217;t print this email to save paper&#8221; messages. Like anyone can print anything these days. We&#8217;re out of yellow anti-counterfeiting ink.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m on a list of people in Connecticut that are in some sort of residential management business. Hopefully they&#8217;ll figure out why Jim never responds to email.<\/li>\n<li>The furthest email so far is from CostCo Australia. Wow. I get around. Not bad for a guy without a passport.\n<ul>\n<li>But the Springbok Casino in South Africa gave it a run for its money<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>I got a gender reveal (shudder) for Nova Reign (shudder). Quite a Tragediegh.<\/li>\n<li>I missed my $55 Lash Fill at Beauty by Beltz in Bryan OH. Was I getting ripped off?\n<ul>\n<li>Also, what the hell is a lash fill, anyway?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>A Republican representative for Ohio sent me a survey about the Laken Riley Act. I answered. I left a few choice words about fascism and the futility of cruel and unusual punishments.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>After deleting over 14K emails, my storage went from 3.11GB to 2.09GB. There&#8217;s less juicy stuff this year.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sorry about the Sex Pistols tickets. Those are\u00a0\u00a3150 tickets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a while since I looked at what my alternate selves have gotten up to. Some background: When Google&#8217;s Gmail product went live on 4\/1\/2004 I grabbed a coveted first-initial-last-name account. My brother wanted that account (we share an initial) but I think he&#8217;s forgiven me, especially when he reads about what that email &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federate","footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"1"},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alternate-uncles"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/wandering.shop\/@UncleJosh\/113943773862438374","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":555,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions\/555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}