[Albert Lionheart]

Tales from the toolroom - how to have a panic attack
This was really spooky and raised the fear of a conspiracy against me....

Client has met the Spanish Archer (El Bow) and has been "resigned" from her job. Kind IT guy at work saved her personal contacts onto a CD as a PAB (personal address book) file which she presented to me saying she could not open the thing and extract the records that had been saved in there for her. While we were talking about we looked through the existing contacts list and I noticed a couple of names I thought I knew - unusual names so I said "I didn't know you knew Charlotte X" - "Oh yes - known her for years, in fact I have just been to see her" Not quite sure about this as the Charlotte X I know would be at work, not running about the countryside. Not quite her thing, as they say. She seemed evasive about this but I didn't follow up on it and forgot all about it.
I tried to import the content of the file into her version of Outlook but no good so I emailed a copy of the thing back to my pc and then saved the attachment onto my desktop. I would add that I was using the workshop hack machine as the office beast is not put at risk by things like this. Anyway, I opened Outlook on the wksps machine and set it to import the contact files from the PAB file - no problems I thought as the contacts list filled up with names and addresses. As these names appeared I suddenly noticed that I knew most of them, and they were all names I had either had dealings with in the past or were existing clients. Now this is beginning to worry me - why would this woman have the names and addresses of a large chunk of my client base on a CD given to her by the IT bloke where she used to work?
I had a little sit and a think and a cuppa and decided to clear the lot out of the contacts list on that machine (I still had all the contact records in the office machine) and try again. Same thing happened - grasping at straws I cleared the list and tried a third time, but after first moving her contacts file from the desktop to a folder in the Documents folder, and being particularly careful about the path where the source file was held. This time a completely different set of records appeared and all strangers! How this happened I have no idea, but the combination of her knowing one of my friends and then all these names from her contacts listing didn't half give me the willies for a while!