What does 'lock me' mean?

November 4, 2021 4:03 PM

I received a misaddressed email. The signature concluded with “Lock Me” in quotes. Why? Is this a quote, a motto or something else?

The misaddressed email was a routine request for information from someone who works in administration for a medical body. The signature in the email looked like this:

Sender's Name
Department
Medical Body Employer
Address line 1
Address line 2 (Massachusetts)
Phone number
“Lock Me”

The sender has a female given name, an uncommon Italian surname and from a quick web search appears to be Jewish, in case any of that helps.

This email was not spam or any sort of scam. My email address is one typo away from that of a hospital and a few times a year I get email for them. This was entirely in line with similar previous emails.

Assume I'm not able to ask the sender, please. Answers based on knowledge, hunches etc. (anything except baseless guesswork) welcome.

posted by Busy Old Fool to Grab Bag (8 answers total)

Best answer: Thoughts:

Was the information confidential and could this refer to privacy practices?

Was there an image next to the words that could indicate they were doing a campaign about locking up firearms or medications?

Could this be a reminder for people to lock their screens when away from their computers? A recent cyber security training at my workplace highlighted this, even telling people to lock their screens if they went to the bathroom while working from home, so there could be an internal campaign about that?
posted by centrifugal at 5:05 PM on November 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Best answer: My work has an email integration with a ticketing system, and certain keywords in an email will trigger followup actions to happen. E.g., "close me" might auto-close a ticket.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 5:48 PM on November 4, 2021 [8 favorites]

Best answer: The fact that the email was sent to the wrong address by the author indicates, to me, someone who was busy and multi-tasking. They may have had windows open in several applications and it is quite easy to type something short while focussed in the wrong window. Especially if it is a password. “Lock me” is a terrible password, but it is the kind of thing somebody might choose.
posted by rongorongo at 12:50 AM on November 5, 2021

Response by poster: Thanks for the ideas!

Was the information confidential and could this refer to privacy practices?

Interesting thought. There was an attachment with a large number of forms to fill in. I didn't open them but from the filenames I'd say they were private but not especially confidential: insurance details rather than patient records. "Lock me" could refer to privacy practices but since it was sent between organisations I would expect it to be more widely known.

Was there an image next to the words that could indicate they were doing a campaign about locking up firearms or medications?

No, the signature appeared exactly as in my question. It was a multipart email but there was no additional formatting in either part.

Could this be a reminder for people to lock their screens when away from their computers?

I like that! It would fit in with someone working in the medical field and it would make sense as a slogan. Counting against it is that an email signature is a strange place to put a reminder to yourself and that I can find no reference to this as a slogan to encourage screen locking anywhere else.

My work has an email integration with a ticketing system, and certain keywords in an email will trigger followup actions to happen.

That's also an intriguing idea and I guess you might lock an internal ticket while waiting for a response. I can't find any reference to a ticketing system that works in that way but other than that it's definitely plausible.

It could be a well-known internal saying, slogan or motto within Medical Body Employer.

That's definitely a possibility I considered and if I can't find a definitive answer it will always be an option. Slightly strange to put an opaque internal slogan on an email signature, but humans are weird so that doesn't discount it.

it is quite easy to type something short while focussed in the wrong window. Especially if it is a password.

A very possible idea, I can imagine it being a password and I can imagine someone typing their password into the wrong window, not that I've ever done such a thing, oh no not me. The only doubt I have is that putting active cursor focus on a new line at the end of an email signature seems hard to do accidentally. But perhaps a keyboard shortcut meant to move to another window could move the cursor.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 2:26 AM on November 5, 2021

Best answer: Given the medical context, and following up on Blue Jello Elf's suggestion, could it have something to do with the possibility of adding HIPAA protection to emailed attachments?
posted by dizziest at 7:09 AM on November 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

Best answer: The only doubt I have is that putting active cursor focus on a new line at the end of an email signature seems hard to do accidentally.

I actually do this all the time in outlook. I'm not sure what I do, but I start typing and discover that I'm at the tail end of my sig file.
posted by PussKillian at 8:29 AM on November 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I used to work somewhere where they had some cockamamie email encryption thing where you would type, I think, "encrypt me" anywhere in the body of the email and the email system would know to route that email through the encryption thing. If you were to put "encrypt me" in your email sig, everything you sent would go through the more secure system. "Lock me" sounds a bit like maybe a similar clunky scheme.
posted by dirtdirt at 8:20 PM on November 6, 2021

Response by poster: Thanks loads for all the answers!

There wasn't one which made me say 'oh that's definitely it' but I kind of doubted there would be. Certainly some very intriguing and plausible ideas, much appreciated!
posted by Busy Old Fool at 1:02 PM on November 26, 2021