This is not the Will Norris you're looking for

Hi, I’m Will Norris. If I directed you to this page, then you may also be named Will Norris. Or perhaps you were trying to get in touch with a friend or relative or client of yours named Will Norris. Or maybe Bill Norris. Or perhaps Wayne or Ward or Walter Norris. But alas, you’ve reached the wrong Will Norris.

I’m in my late thirties. I work on open source software at Twitter. I’m married to my lovely wife. We live near San Francisco, California.

I am not a bartender in Austin, Texas. I am not a lawyer in Los Angeles. I’m neither remodeling nor selling my home, and I’m not dating middle aged women in New Hampshire. I didn’t order a replacement power cord for my HP printer, nor did I have my Chevy Tahoe serviced at a Sears outside Orlando, Florida.

But it’s okay. Maybe you just typoed the email address. Or perhaps you were given the wrong email address by someone else. I’m not upset; it’s not a big deal; I really do understand.

But I did want to bring it to your attention because the situation could be a tad more serious. I’ve received a disturbingly large number of legal documents from lawyers that were not intended for me. I really, really don’t want them. I’ve also received a surprisingly high number of (seemingly legitimate) welcome emails from various services I never signed up for. I can only guess that someone mistakenly thinks that my email address is actually their email address. So they may not be getting the email they were expecting and not understand why.

So here it is. I have the email address wnorris@gmail.com (it’s not the one I use primarily, but I have it). You do not. Nor do you have the email address w.norris@gmail.com. That one is me too. Really. You see, Gmail ignores the dots in the first part of the email address, so “wnorris” is the same as “w.norris”, which is the same as “w.n.o.r.r.i.s”.

There are a lot of people named Will Norris in the world, so it’s inevitable that confusion will arise from time to time. So you might want to double check with that client of yours to find out their correct email address, or even double check your own email address to make sure you have it right.

Yours truly,
Will Norris (no, not that one… the other one)