Unsettling News

UPDATE: This entry is an April Fool’s Joke. More notes on it here.

OK, I think it’s safe to say I’m seriously freaked out.

It started yesterday afternoon with a phone call that, at the time, I only found amusing. Here it is, roughly, from memory:

“Hello?”

“Is this Nat?” The guy had a rough voice and a hard-to-place accent.

“Um, Nate, not Nat.”

“Nate. You have this web site called Polytropos?” (He pronounced it incorrectly.)

“Um, yeah . . .” I was wondering how he got from there to my phone number. Not hard to do, but he would have had to go through a lot of bother when he could have just emailed me.

“I would like you to stop writing about my company.”

“What’s your company?”

“I think you know. You have been mentioning us quite a bit recently, in a not-so-flattering light. We do not need or want that kind of publicity.”

“Who is this really?” I said. Then he hung up.

I didn’t think much of it, and assumed it was just a practical joke, and I’d find out which of my friends did it in a day or two. But earlier this morning, as I was leaving the building with Ella, I saw a big guy hanging around out front. He turned to face me as I came out, enough that I stopped because I thought he was going to say something. When he didn’t I just nodded and kept on going toward teh car. As I was hooking Ella into her car seat I saw that he was coming up behind me.

“You are Nate?” he said. His voice sounded kind of like the guy on the phone but I can’t be sure.

“What do you want?” I said. My heart was pumping. I was thinking to myself, irrationally, “If this guy takes me down who’s going to know that Ella’s alone here in the car?”

“I am just here to say that I was serious when I spoke to you on the phone. Have a good day with your daughter.” Then he turned and walked away.

I just called the police (had a grand old time trying to explain the concept of a “weblog” to them), but it’s obviously one of those “nothing we can do now; call us if he tries to contact you again” things. As which which company he’s talking about, I can only assume it’s Northbridge, but who the heck knows? And why should they care about me? I guess if you do a search for their name you’ll come across the blog on the second page of searches, but everybody knows that blogs have inflated status on Google. Or maybe they don’t know, and so think that it’s a bigger deal than it is. I don’t know. Maybe it’s still just a practical joke, although at this point I’ve ceased to find it funny.

Anyway. I’ll be sure to keep you posted on any future developments, if any.