The Visit
By Carl Bussjaeger, October 9, 2009

Addendum, November 15, 2009

This could be interesting. I had a visitor on October 6th. He came straight in to my novel Net Assets, downloaded it, and left.

Host: 152.216.1x.xx
/nab/netassets.pdf
Http Code: 200 	Date: Oct 06 12:30:37 	Http Version: HTTP/1.1 	Size in Bytes: 1069801
Referer: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=dilbert+hero+wally+research+%22quitting+t
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;
.NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

Because of my Webalyzer report, I had a good idea what I would find, but I decided to verify. Who does that IP address belong to?

10/09/09 15:18:35 IP block 152.216.1x.xx whois.geektools.com
Trying 152.216.1x.xx at ARIN
Trying 152.216.1x at ARIN
OrgName:    Internal Revenue Service 
OrgID:      IRS
Address:    1111 Constitution Ave. NW
City:       Washington
StateProv:  DC
PostalCode: 20224
Country:    US

Just as I thought. The Revenuers.

If you haven't read Net Assets (and why not?), you may be unaware that the Internal Revenue Service is not portrayed as gloriously efficient Heroes of the Republic therein. Although they got off light compared to NASA and the FAA.

So, what do you think? Am I about to get audited?

Of course, the real puzzler is that referer. Did that search string actually give them a link to Net Assets?

"152.216.1x.xx""

Which happens to be the IP address at the IRS that prompted this orginal post (since redacted for privacy reasons). Hmmm...

So I had to give it a shot. I punched that IP into Google, and took a look at the results. I may have been hasty in predicting an audit. In fact, I suspect we may have a fellow traveller in the IRS. Good luck to you. And if NA was fun, you may also like my short story "Postage Due".