This happened about a decade ago. I have a very common Spanish name, and my email is formatted as “first.last@gmail.com.” I’ve had this email for so long I can’t even remember when I set it up. For some reason, people often don’t understand how email works, so I end up receiving random things like bank statements, bills, and other personal documents. The senders are always different people—usually with varying middle names.
One day, I started receiving meeting notes, spreadsheets, and presentations from a random company. I politely replied to explain they had the wrong email address, but no one ever listened. Then, out of the blue, I was added to a group chat (on some now-defunct Google product).
So, naturally, I joined the chat.
The participants started discussing a customer issue and throwing around questions. I decided to chime in and started offering my “expert” opinions—completely making things up as I went. At first, my responses seemed reasonable, but eventually, they became completely nonsensical.
Then I went full chaos mode. I called them out, saying, “You’re all idiots for not double-checking your emails before sending invites!” The chat went dead silent, and a moment later, I was unceremoniously kicked out of the room.
But I wasn’t done. I still had access to their shared documents. I edited the document titles to say things like, “You should seriously double-check who you’re sharing documents with.” It gave me such a good laugh watching them notice the edits and frantically change the titles back.
After about two weeks, I got bored and removed the docs from my drive. That seemed to finally do the trick—no more emails from them after that.
Interestingly, this wasn’t a one-time thing. Over the years, similar situations have happened with other companies.
TL;DR:
A company mistakenly shared documents and added me to their group chat due to an email mix-up. I joined, created some chaos in the chat, and trolled them by editing document titles. Eventually, I got bored, deleted everything, and never heard from them again.
(Edit: Fixed typos.)
