Reunion: You suck.

One day last week, I received an email that appeared to be from an old friend of mine. At first I thought maybe it was some kind of spam (note to self: learn to trust your first instincts). I didn't recognize the name of the sender right away, and the subject line said that this person had added me as a friend on reunion.com. But then I realized that the name in the sender column was in fact the name of someone I used to be friends with, I just wasn't used to seeing her married name.

So I was kind of interested to see that this person was looking me up online, wanting to reconnect. Of course, I did think that it was odd that she was doing it by reunion.com, which I've never visited before but had seen ads for and didn't think anyone actually used, instead of something like facebook. But I wanted to see if she had something interesting online there that I could respond to or whatever. So, I followed the link in the email, and filled out the initial information to sign up for a free membership. Dumb.

Dumb, because (a) even though I saw her name online as if she's a member once I got online at the site, I was informed that I couldn't access any more of her information or send her a message or anything unless I first purchased their "premium" membership, which no way was I going to do; and (b) after leaving the site, I checked my other two email accounts, (a work email account and a second personal account; man I have too many email accounts), and I saw new messages in both accounts from myself, saying that I was trying to add myself as a friend on reunion.com and sending a link that I'm supposed to follow to read the message from myself. So, I guess that when I filled out the info to get a "free membership" on reunion.com, (which isn't an actual membership, b/c all it does it get you to the page that says memberships cost money), the site took advantage and gathered my contact info in my first email account, and automatically sent emails to all those contacts, telling them all that I'm looking for them online.

So, great. (A) I've probably downloaded some kind of virus onto my home computer; (B) some random site out there has probably sent who-knows-how-many emails out to people, some of whom I may not have spoken to in years or may never have been friends with at all, saying that I'm looking for them on reunion.com, just because my email account has their email addresses automatically stored in my contacts file; (C) those people are all probably wondering "wtf," when they get that email that looks like it's from me; and (D) the person I thought at first had been thinking and wondering about me and wanting to look me up and drop a line probably in fact hasn't thought about me in years and has no interest in looking me up or dropping a line but instead just made the stupid mistake, as did I, of following a link on a spam email and then actually, incredibly, dumbly, filling out personal information on that site for a free membership.

MAN, I'm an idiot.