from time to time i look in my inbox and i see letters from some random stranger claiming that their father/uncle/brother/husband is the former president/manager/etc of the central bank of gambia/turkmenistan/sumatra and that if i’d only give them my bank account # they’d happily give me a significant fee/percentage for allowing me to transfer legitimate funds out of their country and into the u.s.
whenever i receive these(or random spam for pharmeceuticals)i wonder, ‘do these ever work?’
like, for example, the guy in the bar who walks up to women and uses dreadful pickup lines and routinely gets ignored or laughed at.
these approaches(dreadful pick-up lines or ‘give me your account information’ spam)have to work sometimes, right?
otherwise the guy in the bar would try a different approach and the spammers would try other ways to get people’s account info.
right?
so:
option one: people are using the same failed approaches over and over again in the hope that someday they’ll meet with success. kind of like the ‘if you put a thousand monkeys in a room eventually they’ll write a sonnet’ school of unjustified optimism.
or
option two: occasionally these approaches actually work. occasionally the guy in the bar finds someone naive or desperate enough to respond to his schtick, and occasionally the spammers get someone naive or dumb enough to send them their account info.
i don’t know. i do know that the ‘give me your account info and i’ll give you FREE MONEY’
emails are fantastic and entertaining.
i hope that someone somewhere is archiving spam. in 20 years from now we’ll all look back nostalgically at pre-holographic spam…’remember when spam was only text? now it’s those annoying holograms who show up in your bathroom when you’re in the shower.’
one generations junk is the next generations nostalgic treasure.
in fact it’s one of my only regrets that i wasn’t more diligent about saving photos/fliers/cassettes/letters/etc from when i was growing up and in school.
i’m not advocating hoarding, but it’s probably a good idea to save stuff now(that doesn’t take up too much space)and then throw it away in 20 years.
ok, that sounds like an advocacy for hoarding. maybe just save the good stuff.
or make time capsules.
no one ever regrets making a time capsule(unless it’s a smallpox/ebola time capsule. then it might be regrettable.).
ok, it’s late. time for sleep.
-moby