Over the last couple of weeks I've been trying to arrange to get a proper lock fitted on my back gate at home: one that you can conveniently open with a key from either side, instead of having to reach through the gate to a fiddly padlock and risk dropping your entire keyring on the wrong side of a gate you can't get through.

I found an online recommendation for a handyman, and since he had an email contact address listed, I thought I'd do the initial feasibility discussion by email in the hope that it would be less hassle than faffing about with telephones. This turned out to work very well: he was able to send me a URL showing the precise type of lock he suggested would be best, and in return I sent him a URL to a photo I'd just taken of my gate so he could judge whether it was suitable to take that lock without actually having to come and look at it, and then he sent me an official quote for the job as a PDF.

What I wasn't expecting was that an hour ago, when I was in the Tesco near work buying my lunch, a guy I'd never seen before stopped me in an aisle and asked ‘Are you Simon?’ – and when I spotted the logo on his jacket, I realised he was the handyman himself! He'd found my picture on my website somehow (my guess is by trimming the URL of the photo I'd sent and following links back to my home page, though I suppose it's also possible he might just have googled me), and remembered it well enough to recognise me in passing.