A few weeks ago I got an email from a woman who lives in Ontario Canada. She told me that she had a problem with a program she had purchased and asked if I could help her. Here is what she wrote:

Hi Dan.I found your site and am hoping someone can help with a problem.I have bought the full version of SmileBox. I loved making scrapbooks and emailed them to my friends. Now I have a problem. When I try to send a smile card I get a message that says problem sending creation. I wrote to the company who then sent me three pages of instructions. I am a senior and not that great on computers. I did install the program Flash like they said. They said to uninstall Flash but I couldn’t find it anywhere on my computer. I have cable internet and have no problem with it except with SmileBox. I love the program and have paid for one year. Can you help with this ? I would really appreciate it. Nicole from Ontario canada.

What baffled me about this email is that I didn’t recall making any public announcements that I was going to work at SmileBox.com. I had accepted an offer and was about to start working there one week later.

I did a Google site-search on my blog wondering if I had made mention of it somewhere unknowingly. But no. Searching my site for SmileBox returned no results.

I did a site-search at SmileBox to see if they had already added me to their contact page or something. But no results there either.

So I replied and told her that I had not started working at SmileBox yet but that I would help her get everything working for her again. And then I asked her how it was that she knew to contact me.

In her reply she told me that she found my site after searching for uninstalling Flash. She made no connection between me and SmileBox.com. It was just a coincidence. A very big one.

I did a Google search for uninstalling Flash smilebox and sure enough. Polygeek.com pops up on page two of the results.

One of my favorite quotes is, “Million to one odds happen 5 times a day in New York City.”

I guess billion to one odds must happen once a day on the web.