I ran across this amusing blog post the other day and it made me chuckle. It involves me as a focal point of the narration, primarily due to my connection with DreamHost. I don’t know either of the two people involved in the story personally and there are several incorrect facts that show that they don’t really know much about me, either.
This is not the first time someone has tried to leverage some knowledge of me to gain something, but I think this is the first time when it’s something that’s completely unconnected to me. Just dropping my name is apparently now a way to persuade someone else to do things for you. It didn’t actually work in this case but who knows if it’s worked other times?
I think from here it can only be a very short walk to being recognized on street corners, right? Yeah…
Anyway, it’d be a funny story even if I wasn’t involved.
4 replies on “Is this Fame?”
You’re definitely right about neither of us knowing much about you. But basically this guy claimed to be your 16 year old son demanding me build an entire website, design, CMS and all from the ground up for free.
He even sent me some emails from “abuse@dreamhost.com” and “dallas.kashuba@dreamhost.com” by changing some headers. Eventually (like first day) I started to discover he’s British, and just some weird guy that wouldn’t drop this.
I told him I was going to post it and he told me my account would be suspended 😛
I have his email if you want. 😉
Haha, that’s a pretty random happening. Thanks for writing it up!
I’m not even old enough to have a 16 year old kid!
Dallas: I’m not sure that counts as fame… but the parking lot full of screaming fans that greets you in the parking lot probably does. 😛
Actually, with Dreamhost being one of the biggest hosts in the world… do you ever get people coming up to you that recognize you? Obviously not the same attention as a rock star, but it would seem like there’s enough volume there to be recognized for what you do.
On another note, I think it would be more convincing if these crazies pretended to be related to Josh. 😉
Haha, thanks for the ego pat but no, no one ever recognizes me. Even a biggish web host doesn’t really have thaaat many customers, and I know I personally wouldn’t recognize top management from most of the big(ish) companies I interact with… Vonage, Speakeasy, etc.
I’d probably only even recognize Steve Jobs (of course), Bill Gates, and Steve Ballmer. I don’t know what the heads of Sony, Nintendo, Adobe, or IBM look like, though I’m sure corporate groupies out there do.
I do randomly meet people who use our service, though, and that’s pretty cool. I always have to make sure they’re happy with the service before I decide how to take the conversation, though! Fortunately they always seem to be… or maybe that’s just what they tell me.