This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
Freshness Warning
This blog post is over 20 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.
9 Jul 2003
That’s nice. I found a problem on Major League Baseball’s Web site and sent their general-contact email address a short message detailing the problem and gave them a solution. My email was immediately returned to me.
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mail1.chek.com.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.fanfeedbackreply@website.mlb.com:
Sorry, your intended recipient has too much mail stored in their mailbox. Your message totalled 2314 bytes, which would bring them over quota. However a smaller message might go through should you wish to inform the person you tried to email.
There’s so much wrong with this that I don’t even know where to start.
Go grab a pen and write this down. If a customer is going to go to the trouble of contacting you, it’s important, at least to them. Make sure you’ll see it.
Well, that's better than the response I usually get when I send in a report pointing out an anomaly on a web site: "Switch to MSIE on a Windows machine. That's what we tested it on and what we officially support."
Excerpt: Adam blogs a quick diddy about how Major League Baseball is turning away customers. The kicker for me is this
I believe that both "totaled" and "totalled" are valid. (Just like "artefact" and "artifact" are both valid..) Go figure.
You appear to be correct. Many dictionaries list "totalled" as an alternate spelling. Some list it as an archaic spelling. At any rate, I don't think they spelled it that way on purpose.
In English, "totalled" is the correct spelling, and "totaled" is incorrect. In American, "totaled" is correct. The site being American though, tends to suggest that it should be "totaled"... and no matter how hard I try, I just cannot type "totalled" in with a single l.
http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/virusinfo/virus.aspx?id=49473 if you scroll down to "method of distribution" it sounds like this might be the work of a virus... I got the same message after emailing a hotmail.co.uk address
This discussion has been closed.
Greg
July 9, 2003 3:35 PM
I'm fond of automated responses that try to convey emotion ("I'm afraid..." - "Sorry"), acting as if the server was not only capable of those feelings, but as if fear and sorrow were the appropriate responses (and maybe they are). Incidentally, the use of totalled may be deprecated, but it does not appear to be incorrect: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=totalled