Screwball Central, Alberta, Today:
Three news stories.
Wandering River: Drunk gets on a tractor and proceeds to rip up the local golf course.
Red Deer: Guy steals a funeral van with a body in it.
Lethbridge: Some dummy hooks up chemical cleaner to a coffee machine giving a pregnant customer a wakeup call.
No, you’ve not see, read, hear. or experienced everything.
Then there’s the recent story of someone I know well who was harassed by phone calls and, one morning subsequently, got a sealed letter on his front doorstep addressed to someone with his last name, but a different first name. He went online but, at first, could not find that combination of names. He did find a couple of references to an African with that first name. Curious, he Googled just the first name and found that, unscrambled, there was only one other word: Behead!
Not giving up, he tried the reverse phone no. search online and found the guy who left the message was an agent in Calgary. Then he checked Google News and found that combination of names for Edmonton father of a local soccer superstar who signed for over 20 million.
Agent agreed to desist communication. Harassed man has kept letter and hasn’t opened it, deferring to some date way down the road in the future. This is how an innocent, totally unrelated person got ensnared because someone erroneously assumed that the superstar’s father was the same person as someone with the same last name in whatever source was used arbitrarily.
No, human beings often get it wrong and usually assume too much. They can be just plain dumb or go rogue with their agendas. I used to think that most people in our society were smart or had common sense or were literate, but now, no. Those people are the few and far between exceptions. Ignorance is strength today. Look no further than Trudeau and Trump.