Somewhere out there there’s a woman who thinks her email address is my email address. She must do, because I’ve received flight confirmations, parent-teacher evening requests and random people contacting her because their pastor recommended her as a one fine lady. We shall call her Holly (largely because that’s her name).
Through receiving her emails, I actually know quite a lot about this woman. Other than her being one fine lady, I know she has a son called Noah; that she has a piano which gets tuned by a man called Bob; that she travelled to Chicago with 2 family members on the 24th April; that she is very involved in her church and that her husband is the president of a local Christian college. I also know her phone number, her frequent flyer number, which Tiger pack her son is in (I’m assuming it’s like scouts, otherwise it all sounds a little jungle-book) and I have a sneaking suspicion that the number 8 doesn’t work on her computer. I actually think I probably have enough information to steal her identity. Not that I know how to go about that, but were I the sort…
If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m a Nice person. At least, I’m able to suppress the Nasty most of the time and let the Nice triumph, even if it is through gritted teeth and glares when waiting for tourists to finish taking photos of themselves in the middle of the pavement (trans. Sidewalk). So not only have I not stolen her identity, I’ve also been replying to all of these misguided emails, telling the sender that I am not Holly. Until recently I didn’t know her actual email otherwise I could have signposted them, or at least emailed her and let her know that the reason she’s never heard from all these people is that she doesn’t know her email address.
A couple of the people I’ve replied to have replied back. Some apologising, some checking I’m 100% sure I don’t have a son called Noah, and one actually letting me know Holly’s real email address (my email address but with the number 8 at the end) . In one of these exchanges the woman replying to me asked me, oh so naively, if I lived in Clearwater Florida too.
I’ve done some research. Clearwater Florida has a population of around 100,000. I don’t think this woman really has much of a handle on how the internet works. Never mind that the USA has a population of 304,059,724 so the chances of me being in the 100,000 strong population of Clearwater are pretty damn small, there’s a whole world out there in which a quarter of its population speak English. I chuckled to myself and thought what an adorable example of Americans living up to their stereotype it is.
I know it is a stereotype, and in all likelihood this poor woman is fairly new to cyberspace, but the fact is the majority of Americans do have a pretty sketchy appreciation of geography. I’m not saying they all think that Australia is Iran but I have taken to just saying I’m from London to avoid the blank stares that mention of any other city brings.
(I should probably say here that Jeremy is a major exception to the rule. One of his favourite games is for me to name a country and him to tell me what the capital is. He’s pretty good. )
Another endearing America trait is their ability to be entirely un-phased by distance. This comes from living in the third largest country in the world. Contrast that with living in the UK, which can fit into the US 40 times over and you’ve got some very different ideas on how many miles equal ‘far’.
It doesn’t help that England’s roads basically originated from sheep paths and are therefore the windiest, narrowest, slowest roads known to (wo)man, so getting places takes a long time. My to-be mother-in-law once asked me if she could do London, Cornwall and the Lake District in one weekend. Technically she could, but she’d spend about 2 hours not in the car.
With Jeremy and I, our different nationalities (and therefore relative-distance-appreciation), make for interesting navigating at times. That and I’m pretty lazy and don’t like walking long distances. He generally resorts to lies and trickery. Jeremy has a habit of telling me how far places are according to his GPS watch (he also likes to tell me how fast we’re going when on trains / planes and likes to ask me every 2 minutes how far I think we’ve walked to highlight my poor grasp of all things measurement-ish). In Spain last month it took me quite a few hours of walking towards locations allegedly close by for me to realise that this is as-the-crow-flies and I am not a crow. In America though, this navigational system works ok because they’re basically all crows. Or at least their roads go in straight lines rather than respecting the rights of hedgerows.
Mock it as I may, I quite like the American vision of the world (ignoring the dangerous implications of isolationism of course). Mostly because it makes the Atlantic seem a heck of a lot smaller and the issue of my family being 3000 miles away a minor inconvenience.
You're right, you're not a crow.
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