Spam spam spam spam spam

Spam.

I mean really.

Whats the point?

Do these people really think that I'm going to follow a link to find out about fantastic stock options when the company that sends them out can't even spell stock? Do they think I have some kind of mental deficiency?

Why would I seek medical remedies to an ailment from a company that can't even spell Viagra? And for that matter, what the smeg is Cialis. Or Cailis. Or Caliis, or whatever other mistyping you care to use...

I know why they do it. I mean my spam filter, if I had one, would be set to filter out anything with viagra, cialis etc in the title or body text. But still, I'm hardly likely to want to invest in a companies product if their idea of good marketing is bulk spam Email now am I.

And then we have the Nigerian scammers. Those seemingly hard of thinking, or at the very least dyslexic pillocks who send out requests for help transferring ludicrous sums of money... I mean really, am I to believe that Samuel Mgobi, manager of the foreign and UK accounts department in the Bank of Nigeria doesn't know English well enough to form a single coherent sentence? And if so, am I still supposed to be confident enough in his abilities to conduct business efficiently and properly when he can't even correctly spell Nigeria?

I get a <em>lot</em> of spam hitting the black lion account and I have to manually trawl through it to find the actual emails and it really baffles me why anyone bothers sending this stuff out. But then I read the newspapers and I realise why...

I mean, given the terrible spelling, the stupid offers, the outrageous claims (by now, if I'd taken up every offer this week I would have a wang somewhere in the region of 42 feet long...), how do people fall for it? I know that most of the general public are pretty special, I've been in retail for my entire working life, but even given that you'd have to have some kind of gift to really, honestly believe that the manager of the Bank of Nigeria wants you! Yes you Mrs Wandslow of 32 Hermitage Avenue, Essex! He wants to give you a whopping $6.7 million just for the minor inconvenience of handing over your bank details and taking part in what is in effect international banking fraud... Wow! What an opportunity. Or maybe not.

I would reply and tell these spammers what I thought and tell them to go "firk ding blast!" themselves but all that achieves is verifying your account exists so as thy can then sell it on to more spam email companies. Companies that also spam me on a regular basis offering to sell me directories of millions of verified email addresses. I'm sure there is some kind of law against that. Oh yes, wait a minute, its called the data protection act! Ooops, no doesn't work. Nigeria never signed up to that one. And they sell the directories.... Damn.

See in the good old days it was easy. You got junk mail through the letterbox but that went straight in the bin. You didn't even have to open the damn stuff most of the time. You got telemarketing phone calls, but they were easy to deal with. I'll tell you a little secret here. I went to apply for a telemarketing job once. I lasted less than half a day of training before telling the manager that I thought he was a reprehensible little turd for what he was asking us to do and walked out. Thats another story though. The point here is that to prevent the telesales agent from giving up on a call the comapny removed their ability to hang up. So the telesales agent has to keep talking, and so selling. Think about it...

So when they next call you just put the phoen down. Don't hang up, just put it to one side and leave it until it starts making that wee-waw siren noise that signals the other person has cleared. Most companies have systems that allow the caller to clear but not all of them. That means the poor schmo on the end of the line has to get his manager over to clear the call. More wasted time, his call averages go down, the company call centre doesn't meet its targets... Imagine if we all did it. They'd be buggered.

Thats just as much of a pipe dream as all the spammers being hit by lightning at the same time though...

Anyway, a ranty train of thought to start another week of hastles and trouble and bloody spam emails.

Damn

- Liam