Flashes of Panic

I got a call from the University last week, wishing to nag me about making a pledge to their capital campaign. I was otherwise occupied and angry about being interrupted, but the twit on the other end of the line was not at all interested in my convenience. He asked if they could send me email. He then read back an email address which they claimed to have on file for me, using an alumni.*.edu subdomain I didn’t know existed at the University and a construction of my name I’m pretty sure they never used.

“You can send all the mail you want to that address,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure I won’t get any of it.” Oh, he asked, what should we use for an address?

At that point I was feeling pretty snooty about it, so I pulled out the alumni.*.edu address for the College.

“Wait, you’re an alumni there? How is that possible?”

I explained that as long as the University offered graduate programs, it was quite likely that many of its alumni would also be alumni of other colleges and universities. He seemed startled by this new revelation.

Noah reported a somewhat less satisfying experience, with the caller “putting him down” for a pledge Noah never mentioned. And the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if perhaps it wasn’t the graduate students dragging down the University’s alumni giving rate, but the boneheads the development office has making their calls.