A few years ago, and completely out of the blue, I got an email from Home. (Home is the name of a local events centre in Manchester, by the way.) The email said, “Thank you for sponsoring one of our Worker bees!”
I opened the email, curious as to why they had sent me an email thanking me for something I hadn’t done. About a month ago I had discovered that it is possible to sponsor a bee at Home, and I had given my email address so that I could receive newsletters regarding sponsoring wildlife, but I hadn’t provided any payment information.
A few minutes later I got another email from Home. The subject of this second email read, “Thank you for sponsoring one of our Drone bees!”
Again, this was slightly confusing for the same reason as above. But my confusion was about to reach dizzying heights with the arrival, just a few minutes later, of a third email, titled “Thank you for sponsoring our Queen Bee!”
Well, this had escalated quickly. My first thought was that I had been targeted by a hacker who was really, really, really ethical. They loved the thrill of hacking, but only ever donated their hard-stolen spoils to the neediest of causes. Where was this going, I pondered.
The next email I received from Home the day after was, yet again, bee related. This time Home emailed me with the subject, “We’re so sorry! We didn’t mean to email you about our bees”. The email was an apology. Home had accidentally emailed their entire subscriber list about bees. It turned out I hadn’t actually sponsored any bees. I was kind-of relieved, and yet had a feeling of general malaise.
The thing is, I liked getting the emails about bees. I affectionately thought of them as my Bee-mails. I’d read each of them and I had learned a little about the role of each type of bee in a hive. I knew more about workers, drones and the Queen. The live Bee-cam was great too. And when I got the apology email signalling the end of the emails, I was a bit saddened. I didn’t want it to end.
So, I sponsored a bee and got the following email.
Life was good again! But probably not quite as good for the Home Email Marketing Manager…
