It is too unbearably hot to focus on any topic for longer than the time it takes for a bead of glow to travel from my forehead to my chin, or to consider how ridiculous it is that a walk down our driveway leaves me feeling like I’ve been on a steeply inclined treadmill for an hour (the driveway is flat by the way). Such forced lethargy and abbreviated attention span sent me with mild curiosity to my spam file where I found 159 spam comments in the queue and another 657 in inventory. I now get why they call it ‘spam’ – you have no idea how it came to be, what its content really is nor why the hell it lives longer than most messages do.
Spam..I’ve never tried to eat the stuff in the can, but I am amused by its literary counterpart. Here are some excerpts from my spam file –
– “What I don’t understand is how you are not much more liked than you may be right now”
– “Wie wil let nou nut? …Sexdating is naturlik helemaal gratis en anoniem”
– “I have certainly picked up anything new from here”
– “Have you tried Viagra?”
– “Cialis works! Contact us @_______”
– “Incredible article, great sex dude”
– “Keep functioning, impressive job”
– “Hormone replacement therapy – no prescription needed”
– “Please cover protein shake diets in the future”
– “Definitely believe that which you have sated. Nice site: check out sexdating – thanks for visiting”
– “Hello I have three children to register and didn’t see the registration form on the site. Their names and ages are ….”
Interestingly a lot of the spam is in languages I don’t recognize – I don’t read Chinese, Arabic, Russian and though I can limp my way through French, that’s the one language that never appears. A lot of the spam comes from some American Airways site – which is peculiar, given that United was the firm’s carrier of choice and the holder of all my personal information. Other than that, the only other pattern I could find was in the number of comments about sex and the presumption that I was male. Also amusing, given that I’ve never written about sex and I am confident that I’m a woman. After enjoying the silliness and complete olio that defines spam, I did find one comment that pretty much summed up my view of the entire file – “Hi Max: You have a fatal error”
Yup, I’d say so…
Waiting for the Karma Truck 