I’m Not a Robot but I Don’t Know How to Use the Internet
The internet is a strange place especially when you’re trying to attract customers or build an audience. Whether you’re throwing money at Google AdWords to get people to your website or trying to build a social media presence, you’ll run into some things that just make you say…”wut?”
I have an engineering services company and I throw money at Google AdWords to attract potential customers to my site. My site is set up so they need to fill out the contact form to get ahold of me and I’ve done my best to prevent spam from coming through using reCAPTCHA.
There are 3 types of people that will contact me through the contact form.
There are the legit leads that have actually read through the website to see what I offer.
There are the people who don’t read a single thing on the website and assume they know what I offer.
Then, there are people that are just completely clueless and I don’t even know how they even knew how to turn on the computer.
My best guess is that these people are not some kind of spammy robot but I’m not sure how things like this even happen.
For example, this form fill from Sherry on May 19, 2021:
Sherry, Sherry, Sherry…what? How did you get to my site? Why are you asking about tracking numbers? What is this? I’m very sorry that your package wasn’t delivered and this is the second that this has happened. I really wish I could help you Sherry, but I’m not sure you’re a real person or not.
I’m going to give Sherry the benefit of the doubt here and assume that maybe she ordered something from a similarly named company. But, if she did order something from a specific company, wouldn’t she know where to go?
I’m not sure what to think really. Maybe it’s some nice 92 year old lady who just wants her goddam package!
I started doing some digging and sure enough, the tracking number is legit. Sherry was right, the tracking number did claim the package was delivered on May 17th. Escanaba, MI seems like a nice little town right on Lake Michigan.
I decided to email Sherry to try and understand what went wrong and more importantly, if she ever got her package. It’s been over 3 weeks now with no reply. I hope one day I will understand how Sherry ended up asking about her lost package on my engineering services website. Until then, I will just have to keep enduring the emails that come through that ask me about the most unrelated requests to what I actually offer.
There are also people like Fredrick. Oh Fredrick, if you didn’t spell your name correctly, I would think that you fell asleep on your keyboard or some Russian mobster was banging your head on the keyboard to try to get some information out of you. I only have 5 fields to fill out and somehow Fredrick was able to drop his name in 4 of them. Hats off to Fredrick.
And then there are emails where I don’t know whether to be concerned or just write it off as nonsense. What exactly is going on here Jen Thorn? Is that your real email address, you must’ve been an early Gmail adopter when it was invite-only. What the actual fuck? If the police won’t help, definitely go find an engineering services website and fill out the form with detailed information about this pretty serious matter.
I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever know what’s going on here. Is my reCAPTCHA not doing its job? Are these real people? Maybe it’s just this guy fuckin’ with me.