While continuing to rummage through old file cabinets and boxes I found this card. This card is a relic from one of the oddest encounters I have yet had while managing public web sites.
This EMPLOYMENT TERMINATION NOTICE arrived at my P.O. Box many years ago, along with a set of papers from the Division of Child Support (DCS) at the State of Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services. The DCS in Washington wanted me to verify the employment and/or termination dates of an individual whose name I did not immediately recognize. This type of paperwork, unfamiliar to me, was part of a child custody or child support suit involving people I did not know. I myself had never employed anyone directly so this paperwork puzzled me. Its connection to a child support suit made it all the more unnerving.
I called the DCS in Washington and explained my confusion. I explained that I had nothing to do with this matter, that I did not know the people whose names appeared in this paperwork, and that I knew nothing about a child support or custody battle between any of my even remotest acquaintances.
The DCS person I talked to did not quiz me too much about this matter, suggesting there had simply been a mix-up in the paperwork. He suggested I return the paperwork to him with a note explaining that I knew nothing about this matter. I did as much, though I took my remove from the situation a step further by writing my comments on a Post-It note which I stuck to the papers. Imagining that my signature on the papers could somehow be interpreted as meaning I had real involvement in this case I issued my comments on separate papers. I might have been a little over-zealous about it but to illustrate my distance from the situation I did not want my name and signature to appear on the actual paperwork from this case.
This happened about 13 years ago. My memory of the details of what had actually happened is somewhat fuzzy but the substance is clear.
I mailed the paperwork back to the DCS but this strange encounter lingered in my mind. "What was that?" I kept asking myself. As with most things in my life it took me some time to understand. I can not remember now if it came to me gradually or all at once but I eventually reached a credible — if no less puzzling — conclusion.
About a year earlier — before I got the paperwork from DCS — I had exchanged a few e-mails with someone who introduced himself to me as a database programmer/administrator of some skill. He wanted to help turn my Payphone Project into a searchable resource. At the time the site listed payphone numbers and locations as free text, a format that I liked and which I could have taken farther. Pages like this list of Manhattan payphone locations included not just listings of public phones but freeform descriptions and occasional stories from site visitors who had some knowledge or experience with those phones. That element of randomness, in which a telephone book comes alive with annotations and stories behind the arbitrary-seeming data, was great fun for a while.
The person who contacted me wanted to clean up that data by formatting it and stuffing it into a database. I could understand the thinking behind this though I was basically apathetic about it. We had a brief e-mail correspondence and I think just one phone call before I let it go. I was not interested — in fact I have never had much interest in working with other people on these personal web projects of mine, at least where the actual production of the content is concerned. Others have certainly influenced things that have happened here but I’ve never entered into a full working relationship with anyone — believe it or not I’ve had several offers from business development and marketing types.
At any rate, this correspondence lasted maybe 3 or 4 days and I soon forgot about it.
Fast-forward just over a year: About a week after I mailed that paperwork back to DCS in Washington it all came back to me. I looked back at my e-mails from over a year earlier and found his name and those few e-mails we had sent back and forth. I did not remember him as being from Washington but I saw in his e-mail .sig lines that that was where he lived.
We never entered into any kind of working relationship but that person told DCS that we had and that he was currently employed by me. The DCS person I talked to suggested that I had hired this person to work for my company (hah!) and that perhaps I simply did not remember him. I told DCS I have no "company" and that I had never hired anyone.
As we spoke I leafed through the papers, seeing the names of the young child and the mother who appeared to be demanding money from this person. As part of the proceedings DCS inquired with me — his supposed employer — about garnishing his wages to help pay the child support.
The EMPLOYMENT TERMINATION NOTICE above is only one of the papers I received, and it was included as a "just in case" fallback. DCS assumed that this person was still employed by me but included that card in case I had recently fired him.
I do not know why I got involved in this. Was this person so irritated with me for not wanting to enter into a working relationship with him that he disdainfully listed me as his employer to let me know he remembered? Or did this person simply do so much freelance work that he honestly got my name mixed up with that of someone else who did hire him? The paperwork from DCS suggested this person worked for me at the time — over a year since the time of our correspondences — so this person had evidently supplied the information about me quite recently.
It was all very strange, the unease I felt further exacerbated by the fact that an obviously ugly child custody case had somehow lurched out of its confines to try and involve someone only remotely connected to one of the parties.
