Ex-Tabula Rasa

I don’t know if this has come across at all in the last two days but Unsolicited Rabbit 2011 is my favourite thing to happen to me in ages.

girl-detective replied to your post: Unsolicited Rabbit Update

Oh man, it’s really too bad that you’re already married because how awesome of a story would it have been if this sparked a whirlwind romance between you and the Rabbit-Sender? That would have been the greatest “how did you meet” story of all time.

November, 2065: An old couple sit facing each other in a living room. Each is in their mid-80s, their faces showing the crags and troughs that come with old age. Tartan blankets cover their legs, an added scintilla of personal heat to add to the roaring log fire. They stare silently ahead, as if listening to the moments pass by, made audible by the grandfather clock on south wall.

Photographs of children and grandchildren jostle for space on the mantlepiece. It is a scene of the quiet dignity and satisfaction of a life spent in the warmth of another.

She breaks the silence.

“I sent it deliberately, you know.”

He looks up at her.

“The rabbit. I saw you on the intracompany webpage and figured it would get you to notice me.”

“I thought you said…”

“‘That’s a bloke who will appreciate a rabbit dressed as a nurse,’ I thought. ‘That’s a bloke who likes to see small animals dressed as people and sending him an image of such a thing - apropos of nothing - will endear me to him and could possibly result in our one day becoming romantically intertwined.”

“I see.”

“And I faked every orgasm.”

The Unsolicited Rabbit Email Conversation Continues

(If the title means nothing to you, my last three posts will illuminate you)

My response to the response to my reply to the original Unsolicited Rabbit:

I must say I’m very relieved to read the reason why Aileen was receiving the nurse rabbit picture (not that I have any desire for her to be ill, of course). It just struck me that it was possible that Aileen could be an employee who was well-known by all her colleagues to be phobic of both nurses and rabbits, and that this email was a particularly vicious form of office bullying in which both of her phobias were combined in a way that was intended to push her over the edge of sanity into the realm of madness and straitjackets. Then I got worried that I had become somehow implicated in the whole sordid affair by receiving the email, and that a Hitchcockian storyline would follow, with crop-dusting airplane chases and mysterious strangers waiting for me in my hotel room, etc.

But that’s just my paranoia about the whole ‘shared  name’ thing. I think it stems from when I was awarded a Gold Award for football skills by my local youth football organisation when I was a child, yet I had only completed the Red Award training program (which involved being able to kick the ball without falling over and knowing the difference between the bit inside the white lines on the pitch and the bit outside it, if my memory serves me correctly). Indeed, I was three years too young to even qualify for the Gold Award. But still they gave it to me, and I still put it on my wall, and I knew for years afterwards that there must have been some other [my name] in our town who had received a Red Award when he was actually at the Gold Award standard, and some day he would find me and sue me for the terrible effect I had had on his burgeoning professional football career and I would die a pauper.

(I’m not sure if you’ve been sharing this conversation with your colleague [My name] II, but if so, please don’t tell him about that last part in case he is indeed the other chap who still harbours deep resentment about his footballing prowess being insufficiently recognised as a child. Thanks!)

Anyway, I am digressing. Thank you for excellent response, and In the spirit of our agreement that bunnies are great for cheering people, I have included below a photograph of a rabbit next to some conversationally relevant footballing paraphernalia. Have a wonderful weekend!

I am enjoying the shit out of this. You need to carry on the correspondence and turn it into some sort of surreal, whimsical TV series written by Graham Linehan and starring Ryan Gosling.

I’m already planning my response, which I think will be my expression of relief that this isn’t some awful office bullying campaign against Aileen, a woman who is well known to her colleagues as phobic of both rabbits and nurses, and that the email was intended to finally push her over the edge of insanity.

I fully believe that this inadvertently-sent email could be the spark of intercontinental friendship, cooperation and possibly even romance.

Unsolicited Rabbit Update

To recap: Yesterday I received the above photograph as an email from someone in my company who works in England and whom I have never before communicated with nor heard of. No text was included in the message, and the subject line was “i [sic] sent this to Aileen.” I concluded that it was intended for someone in an English department of my company who shares my name (albeit with a different spelling).

I sent the following email by way of reply, in which I complimented them on their choice of rabbits, asked what Aileen had done to deserve such jolly messages and suggested that our company should instigate daily bunny emails for morale boostings.

Today I received a reply.

It would appear that the sender had been made aware of my existence by my namesake, a colleague and friend of hers. She appears to be some kind of IT person, as her email contains many references to IT things that I don’t understand, like “the Lotus notes ether” and “IT prattle”.

Her email contained an explanation as to why the rabbit nurse was sent to Aileen, which I shall reproduce here, as I am aware that numerous Tumblr folk have been on the edge of their seats with regard to the whole nurse bunny Aileen email situation since yesterday. Here is her explanation, with notations from myself in square parentheses (“squarentheses”):

“I am pleased that you appreciated my excellent email [this struck me as somewhat immodest, but I will admit, it was an excellent email] . To answer your questions: Aileen is a contractor whom [Other] Philip [aka ”Philip II] and I worked alongside on our recently-concluded secondment to a big evil company in West London [Legal notice: The opinions regarding the company are those of the original emailler, and not at all shared by the writer of this blog. I’m sure the company was actually very lovely].  We were all, alongside a large chaotic team of formatters, trapped inside a glass box where we worked stupidly long hours for several weeks. Subsequently, needless to say, we all went a bit bonkers too [Bonus points for the word “Bonkers”]. As is to be expected, most of us fell ill very shortly after the project concluded. Aileen fell especially ill, horrendously so, and I indicated to Philip II the calibre of get-well messages I had sent her for cheer.

Bunnies are especially good for cheer!”

I think we can all agree with my colleague there. Bunnies are indeed especially good for cheer.

I have a very common name

Because of this, if I work for any decently-sized company, I am probably not going to be the only person with my name working for the company. When I started my last job there was already a person there with the same name as me. For some reason they changed his email address to a shortened form of our names and gave me his old email address. This meant that I received daily emails intended for a feed warehouse manager in Saskatoon.

In the company where I work now, there are actually two other people with my name. One works in the US, the other in England. The others both have slightly different spellings (I am Philip with one L, they have two Ls). For the most part, I don’t tend to get many emails intended for the other chaps, and they don’t get too many of mine. But when we do, we forward them along and joke about who is currently in the lead for receiving the most incorrect emails.

Ten minutes ago I received an email from someone whose name I do not know. Her email address indicates that she is of this company, but there is no email signature, so I don’t know where she works or what she does. The subject line of the email read as follows:

“i sent this to Aileen.”

The entirity of the message, except for the automatic privacy message at the end, is the following:

I am somewhat confused by this, and am unsure what to do next.