December 06, 2001
I read this email from KPMG (whose site looks like hell in Mozilla, BTW) with great amusement and some of the distress that it seems to have caused in others. When I was working on the MnSCU HR web site, we wanted to link to the retirement service providers. Makes sense, we figured it was a bit of good customer service for our employees. First I contacted the webmasters for each of the vendors to check if there were a preferred URL. Most got back to me right away, sometimes with better URLs than I had come up with.
MetLife's response, however, was to forward my message to their legal department, which indicated that they required that we sign a hyperlinking agreement. Unbelievable. The agreement was to last for a period of one year and specify exactly which pages would have links to their site.
Naturally I asked for a copy of the agreement. I mean, how couldn't I? I was dying to see this thing. However, at that point the communication from MetLife stopped. Perhaps it was all a hoax, I don't know. Still, to this day there is no link to MetLife on the HR site. Although in a way I suppose it's playing into their hands, I didn't feel it necessary to reward that sort of nonsense, even with something as trivial as a hyperlink, and apparently no one's bothered to change the page since.
