I am one of the 416 Chosen Ones. Are you?

So, I get this random e-mail this moring. It’s from some guy whose e-mail is “pradipta” something something, but it’s signed by “Max Archie”. No biggie: standard outsourced headhunting spam, I figure. Except there’s 70+ other e-mails following it.

See, the guy used CC instead of BCC in his e-mail, which meant that he not only spammed 416 people, but he shared everyone’s e-mail address. This caused the inevitable droll Reply All responses, and the requisite Reply Alls Tell People Not To Use Reply Alls, and that was going to be the end of it — until someone kicked off with this:

Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:15:39 -0500
From: “Mark [lastname]”
To: “Zack [lastname]”
Cc: [416 people]
Subject: Re: Ruby on Rails position…

this is fun. it’s like a message thread i did not subscribe to. please no more ‘reply all’s. thanks.

Best Regards,

Mark [lastname]

Other quality highlights included the guy who came out of the woodwork just to say “WTF – I’m not even a programmer.”, and another who said: “Hi Max, I am a recruiter who has an opening for a top-tier recruiter such as yourself. I need someone who can unwittingly set off the fury of *at least* 400 people, while ignoring all basic email etiquette. Would you be interested? If not, do you know anyone else who is currently looking for such an opportunity? Sincerely, Thanks for the mile long email thread out of freakin nowhere”.

People took the opportunity to start chatting about OSCON, RubyFringe, and whatever else. And now there’s the Pradipta’s Rolodex Google Group (with two quality threads: 1, 2), the Pradipta’s Rolodex Facebook Group, ThePradipta416.com, a Complainy.com topic, Pradipta on Twitter, the “acts_as_pradipta” Rails plug-in, and the Pradiptas Rolodex FriendFeed room. Plus a fair number of people on Freenode hanging out in #pradipta. We’re even talking unConference.

More of the story at Reverberate.org’s coverage (Reddit comments are quality), Geoff Lane’s coverage and at myShoggoth.

Oh, and don’t forget to check out Max Archie on YouTube.

Edit: Hampton Caitlin (of make_resourceful and Haml fame) apparently just did a presentation at FAILcamp on the Pradipta 416. DHH was also hit up in the original mailing.

It’s like people were annointed by Google’s great prophet, Pradipta.

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