Back, oh, three years ago, in early 1998, I was working at an 'integrated marketing' firm called CKS Partners (which later merged with USWeb to become reinvent, then was reinvented as USWeb/CKS after threatened lawsuits over trademark infringement, then merged with Whitman Hart to become marchFirst, then filed Chapter 11 and got split up and cast to the winds, but that's another saga).

Anyhow, at that time I was doing promo ('marcom') web pieces for Levi's, essentially sites that would live for about a month or two, and be trendy and cool.

So one afternoon I'm checking my email and I get a letter from Paul Moriarty (I always picture a top hat and a twirly moustache), the guy who's basically in charge of IS for the entire company (about 1400 employees, in nearly a dozen offices worldwide). The email just has a single link in it, and so I follow it, to find a page on how to diagnose and live with gonorrhea. 'Hmm. Okay...' and I hit reply and respond with a '?', followed by the quoted text. Five minutes later he rings me up on the phone.

I should mention that despite me being a relatively new hire at this relatively large company with about seven Kevins, I still managed to have the email address 'kevin@cks.com.' Paul asks me to forward the source code of the message to him, so that he can grab the headers, and I go ahead and do just that. To satisfy my own curiosity I take a look at the originating IP of the message and track it down to the computer of another Kevin, working in the New York office.

At this point I chalk it up to another kevin trying to email something to 'kevin@cks.com' just to see if that email address will forward to their own email account. I figure the link was a joke, and it was just dumb thinking that caused them to decide to spoof the email as coming from the one person in the company most likely to track down the source if the email went awry.

I never heard anything more about it while working at the company (which I did for another 18 months).

(to be continued...)