Finding the right Austin is a click away

Published 7:18 am Saturday, March 7, 2020

Aside from the overall septic nature that is the internet, at its base it is a tool. It’s all the information you can ever want or need. You just have to sift through the memes, cat videos and other junk along the way.

No doubt there are more than a few of you that question your life decisions after seven hours of prank videos.

Most everything you desire is a simple Google search away, including the wildly obscure. Type in a couple key words and get ready to stumble your way through thousands and thousands of hits that contain any kind of connection to those keywords.

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It’s the simplest of highways to get your message across as email itself can reach so many areas with the click of a button. Need to reach a business, visit the business’ website and find its contact. It’s just that easy and it only takes a couple minutes. Heck, a majority of the time you can do it from home while on your cell phone, so why do I have to keep asking myself how we continually are confused for Austin, Texas.

Each day — DAY! — I’m turning away multiple emails asking me to interview some band in Austin, Texas, or cover some event in Austin, Texas, or photograph the opening of business … in Austin, Texas.

It wouldn’t be too bad if I received these emails once in awhile. I can understand a mistake here and there, but to deal with sooooo many emails looking for the Austin Daily Herald in Austin, Texas, is baffling. Nevermind the fact that to my knowledge there is no Austin Daily Herald in Austin, Texas.

I’ve done the research — on the internet. In fact, when I did a Google search for “Austin Daily Herald Texas,” which only took me a couple seconds to type, I came up with the Austin Daily Herald. Our Austin Daily Herald. The only one I really know. Another quick click and it was readily apparent that we are in Minnesota.

This entire exhausting verification took me only about a minute and was more than enough to realize that Austin, Minnesota, probably doesn’t care about a new clothing store opening in some Austin suburb.

Generally those people that I do end up talking to are very friendly and nice, we all laugh over the misunderstanding that is — for your fun fact of the day — a difference of 1,097 miles, needing an average car ride of about 16 hours.

And you wonder why you read my columns. The fun facts, of course!

Again, this was an internet search taking only a couple minutes.

The distance of 1,097 miles is a lot of miles so it makes me curious how many publicists manage to think I need to know so much about Austin, Texas.

Maybe they are overworked and rushing things. That’s always a possibility. I have accidently sent emails to the wrong people, but more often than not it’s a case of typing too fast and not paying attention to the email address and having somebody tell me I’ve sent to the wrong Sarah, or these weren’t the droids I was looking for.

All of this I could understand, but over and over and over again, I’m telling people that want me to travel and cover South by Southwest, which takes place in mid-March. Believe me, I would love to cover South by Southwest, but I’m not going to because I’m in AUSTIN, MINNESOTA!

And yet, for all of this venting about how we’re a good two work days worth of driving away, I’m going to be milling through another bunch of Austin, Texas, emails.

It’s probably something I shouldn’t get worked up over, but if this was a process that required hours of intensive research in order to find us or find Austin, Texas, I would understand, but it literally takes seconds to verify who we are.

For the continuing record, the Austin, Texas newspaper is the Austin American-Statesman (www.statesman.com/) They seem like a good newspaper and I’m sure they have a staff filled with super nice people that would love to get news about Austin, Texas.

So for all of you businesses who might be seeing this through an unintended search trying to reach the Austin American-Statesman, we are in Minnesota. Take a couple seconds from your busy day, do a quick search and just scroll through the first few stories. If you see a story on snow, a Lutheran church lutefisk feed or this column based entirely on emails, we are in Minnesota.

And I’m sure there are people in Austin, Texas, who could use a new shirt.