I received an email this afternoon that read (in summary) “Hi Geoff, can you play ‘Are You Sure’ by So? It doesn’t get played on the radio often enough.”
Out of curiosity, I looked the song up on YouTube and, ignoring the fact that my name isn’t Geoff, I played it.
Which is exactly what the email asked.
Nobody benefited from me doing that, though – and certainly not the sender of the email – because the only person who could hear it was me.
The reason I received the email is because it was intended for a DJ at a radio station that either specialises in, or has a show dedicated to, soft rock music (and, in particular in this case, music of the 1980s; that was mentioned in the destination of the email). The sender had mistakenly addressed it to my domain, softrock.co.uk, thinking that was the address of the station.
A quick search reveals they probably intended the email to go to a DJ called Geoff Dorset, who (along with Adrian Collins) presents a show called the Soft Rock Show, on Monday evenings on Express FM, which is based in Portsmouth. I’ve replied to the sender, pointing out their mistake.
I’m helpful like that.
Update: It seemed like a reasonable guess, given the name Geoff and the very similar domain name – but it turns out the sender of my email was listening to Totally 80s, who appear to be based in Benidorm!
Interestingly – or completely uninterestingly, depending on your point of view – the name of my business has nothing whatsoever to do with soft rock music. The story behind the name is simply a play on words: when I was setting up the business (which is 25 years old this year, by the way) I was struggling to come up with a good name. Then I struck on the idea, because I was setting up a software business, to use an oxymoron based on the first part of that word: soft. Hence Soft Rock Software.
Although almost entirely unrelated to the incorrectly addressed email, I’m reminded of something I spotted many years ago (late 1990s?) in my access logs for the Soft Rock Software website.
Specifically, one of the search terms that had led someone to the website was something like “Where can I download soft porn?” – something that you certainly won’t find on the website!
The reason that term got them to the site, though, is that almost all of those words appear on the site, in some cases many times over (‘soft’ appears on every page at least twice, for example, because it’s in the name of the business twice). The only word that doesn’t appear on the site is the word ‘porn’.
The presence of the word ‘soft’ in the search term, by the way, has always puzzled me. Someone was looking for soft porn on the internet? Go figure!