oursin | Irritated hedgehog is irritated (Reply)

Message from owner of scholarly list I subscribe to, forwarding a message from another list-member, asking can I 'look into this'.

'This' being a duff link to a paper posted on the list last week, for which
- no URL or page title is given
- on a subject which a moment's consideration might indicate is Not My Field except in the most tangential of ways.

But the author's first name is the same as mine!

Except, when I went to the list archives and looked for the title of the post the forwarded email related to, it's actually The Other Spelling and an entirely different surname.

How is it that I ended up doing this 'looking into'?

Probably the same set of nerve-endings that yesterday led me to get far too involved in trying to ascertain a rather opaque issue about a copyright holder, rather than simply digging out the address of the family of the individual whose papers the item was amongst as the enquirer requested: because I'm 99.9999 recurring certain that the person who created the file was not the person who created that specific item. Not that I found anything more definite. Person or persons unknown, alas.

I'm not sure if this is pedantry, a mongoose-like tendency to 'run and find out', or a mixture of both, which inconveniences me far more than anyone else.