Email can travel through time

Ever have that experience where you see an old email you’d forgotten about, and it’s like it’s brand new? It’s odd, realizing that you can’t write back as though the person had just sent it.

Well, I can do you one better. For you see, my friends, I have not only received email from the past, but I have replied, and received replies in return!

Let me explain. Today on Twitter, tgpo linked to some amazing surveillance video. Curious to learn if the driver survived, I checked the comments, which linked to a page that at the time was filled with pictures from the accident. The pictures showed that the structure fell down alongside the truck, not crushing the entire cab, but there was no text, so I wasn’t sure why the commenter was so sure the driver survived. I did a little googling and found the original article, on the same site as the pictures, in Google cache.

Try as I might, I could not find a live link to the story, so I hit up the site’s contact information and asked if there was a permalink, or if I could reproduce the story here for you. It’s a great story, after all; definitely worth sharing.

I received a one-line response:

How did you hear about my site and the article?

Well, that was odd, I thought, but I answered:

A friend of mine linked me to surveillance video of the accident, and someone had linked to your pictures in the comments. From there I googled to find the original story.

Here’s the link my friend sent: http://wtfurls.com/videos/488/how-not-to-use-the-drive-through-atm

And soon enough, another one-line response arrived:

I am sorry but we do not share our stories for free.

It was then that I knew I was speaking to someone from 1996.

Wow. Who’d’ve thunk it? Email can travel through time.

I thought about letting it drop, but ultimately I decided to catch the guy up to the 21st century.

If that’s the case, you may want to know that someone has copied your work onto a forum…

http://forums.beyond.ca/st/225751/travel-trailer-takes-out-gas-station/

This story is a real talker; if I were you I’d create a permanent page for it on your site and load that page up with advertising. If you just remove everything, you’re going to lose all that traffic and potential profit. It’s harder to stop the millions of people on the internet from copying your story than it is to give them something they can link to.

Just some friendly advice. I of course won’t be using your story.

Have a good one,

Heather