ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

The other day I got this thing for my blog that lets you see what people do when they visit your website. Like, what pages do they go to, where did they come from, that kind of thing. It can tell if they followed a link or if it was a direct hit where they just typed the address or whatever. Last night I was playing with it and trying to figure it out, and I looked up a couple of the IP addresses that had been there during the day, because it seemed like I had a surprising number of visits, and I was kind of like WHOA about it because it showed the origin as the payday loan store where I used to work.

It wouldn’t have been so odd, but a) I just moved the site for better anonymity and haven’t told many people about it, and b) it had the street address and everything.

Top 3 Guesses:

• My next door neighbor/old roommate still works for that company and accessed the site from work. Due to some weirdo thing with the lookup site, it meaninglessly assigns the same address to all people within the network of stores for that company. My old store was opened and set up before the one she currently works at, so possibly this is what caused my confusion.
• Someone I do not know who is now working at that store found the website as a total coincidence because they were surfing the internet looking for payday loan stuff on Google and happened on the site that way. I doubt it, though, because I have the privacy settings configured to repel spider bots.
• Someone I do know from the old store, such as my old boss, my Indian friend, or my old assistant manager (the good one, not the pizza-coveting one) heard about it from my old roommate and accessed it at work, hopefully noting as they did so that I have maintained complete confidentiality while telling funny stories about customers and coworkers.

It made me kind of homesick for my old job. I like my new job, but I’m so, well, new there. I want to sit around cussing and eating junk food and arguing pointless semantics. If you’re the mystery person from my old company, you know who you are. You visited the site sometime late yesterday afternoon. You did it from work.

So 1) Do I know you? and 2) Is internet use allowed there now, or what?