On Fri 18 Dec 2021 at 12.12 AM Alise wrote:
Sweet Paulie Pie,
The delay between your messages only makes my heart burn with more passion and excitement, as absence does in fact make the heart grow fonder. So you are forgiven lol but I hope you can reply quicker to this email, because I have some VERY exciting news…!
I begged my boss to allow me to go to the International Conference on Mathematics in Dubai and I am ALREADY ON MY WAY! I’m writing this from the airport! The conference is on December 20. I had to make up a story to my boss about how it would be good for my career blah blah blah lol but secretly I just wanted a chance to be closer to you in Iraq lol. I thought if you have a weekend free we could swim across the Persian Gulf (hahahahahaha) or maybe meet at our spot, the Sharajat-al-Hayat (the Tree of Life) in Bahrain. We could even spend Christmas together if you have the time off. What do you think? I can’t wait.
Sorry I didn’t send you a picture in my last email, I was too excited to show you the pie and forgot. This is a picture of me when I saw a giant rat. Isn’t it cute!!! Hahahaha.
Thank you for telling me your secrets about your ex-lover. I won’t tell anyone. My ex-lover-husband loved peanuts (as you know) and wouldn’t shut up about them, in his food or his thoughts. What a shame. I put a lot of love into that relationship but I guess it would have ever worked with such a divide between us. That’s how I know how you are for real. You will protect me, no matter what, from it all. I thank you for the kind thoughts and words you have for me. I too, wish to express to you my love for you. My deepest desire is to see your face with my own and to have you feel the beauty of our love once again. You have shown me what true love is, I’ll never take you for granted, and even though we are separated by distances, miles, I vow to show you my love everyday. I promise that even though I am a long way away from you right now, I will spend every moment of my life making every second count to express my love for you. I’m so glad you have continued to write me. You seem to always find the heart-felt, appreciative, and most importantly, caring writings of my soul, and I am sure that I, too, find myself gaining strength, inspiration and encouragement from your writing. I can not express in words how you will be treasured and how your gifts will be a constant source of happiness and inspiration, which will bring light in the darkest of nights.
Mum says hi.
All the best. Miss you.
Alise
Bonus features
This one’s a doozy and I’m really excited for his next move. Here’s why…
First and most obvious is that I’ve jumped on a pretend plane to go see him. The conference I mentioned is real, in case he cares to Google it. I can’t wait to see how he palms off my overeagerness with bad internet and being too busy. Or maybe he’ll be waiting for me at my favourite tree, who knows. I’m thinking of heading to Iraq for kick-ons after the conference if he’s too busy for me over Christmas. Maybe I’ll go full internet girlfriend stalker on him. We’ll see.
Second, the junk I highlighted in purple was written by an AI text generator. I fed in a bunch of his romantic “I am aware the energy of the Soul is LOVE” rubbish and used that to generate my own filler. I had to do a little bit of copy editing to make sure it read in a similar way to the rest of my emails (don’t want him to catch on), but hopefully this means I can outsource some writing time to robots and waste even more of his time.
Third, I added a tracking pixel to this email. These things are hectic. Apparently it’s common practice for marketing emails to include a single pixel which—when viewed—reports information back to the sender about the time and location at which it was viewed. There’s more information too, like the device used, how long it was opened for, and if it was reopened. *puts on tin foil hat* Fortunately these are not just for marketing companies, any old goose can make one… like this goose! I embedded the pixel waaaaaaay down at a random little spot in our email thread so it is super inconspicuous. Hopefully it works and I will find out where he’s sending the emails from.
Finally, the trickiest part of this email was including a picture of myself. I’d really hoped he would have forgotten about it, but alas if I’m going to keep this romance going I probably have to give him more than just pictures of pie. I wanted to be vigilant though: he could potentially use my photos for a future scam or to forge identity documents. When I first made a Google account for my Paulie emails, I thought I’d better add a picture (and he’d already apparently seen my LinkedIn photo) and used one of me with a quokka, so he’s already got a thumbnail of that photo. I figured the cyber-safest option here would be to include another photo from that day (let’s be real, it was quokka day, I took 100 selfies). That way he wouldn’t have photos of me in lots of different settings (such as on a golf course, in a hotel lobby, and by a Mediterranean beach). I did the old screenshot-of-a-small-thing-blown-up-big-and-then-screenshotted-again trick to make it pixelated. I made sure I sent him the screenshot so there were no metadata on when and where it was taken. I made sure the photo wasn’t of my full face or front on, for identity thievin’. I made sure the photo didn’t capture any of my tattoos, or my real life husband. The photo I posted above is what I sent, but with a black-and-white filter, flipped and cropped, in case he tries to reverse image search the photo I sent and it leads him back here (awkward). Joke’s on me though, if you google my name there are lots of photos of me, no thanks to this website. Oh well, hopefully they’re not that clever.
In conclusion, I think I’m a hacker-detective now.
P.S. When I was googling my name—for Paulie safety—I stumbled upon this article from Nature (i.e. the biggest academic journal in the world, according to Google) that featured my Halloween costume this year. I didn’t even enter a competition or anything, but I guess now I can say I’ve been published in Nature. The internet is wild.
Now I’m looking for the pixel ! ?
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