You
know you have to maintain a sense of humor if you want to get
through this life, don’t you? I was reading the paper over the
weekend about all the stink being created over SPAM. Now, for
those of you not on computers or receiving e-mails from
anywhere, you can stop reading this column as of now, since this
doesn’t apply to you. SPAM is the sending and receiving of
unsolicited e-mail messages from a variety of sources. Most of
these are in the form of some advertisement for various items,
some of which we cannot discuss in a family newspaper. Now, this
article listed a government web site where you were encouraged
to send these unwanted SPAM messages. The theory was that
somehow the government was going to do something about them.
Right….. When I came in this
morning I had 141 e-mail messages. Of those… 3 were from someone
that I knew and who needed some information about something or
another. The remaining ones were just plain junk mail of no
interest whatsoever. New loans, discount credit cards, weight
loss…you name it, I got it. Now, the answer to this is
simple…..just hit the delete button. You don’t need to look at
the e-mail, just delete it. If it comes from Barbette and she
has some nifty photos for you, you don’t need to click on it to
see them….none of us actually know anyone named Barbette. Leave
it alone. You don’t need your house, car, boat, whatever
refinanced….leave those alone. You can’t lose weight while you
sleep and still eat 5,000 calories a day…leave those alone. You
know you didn’t win anything, so don’t fool with those either.
How many seconds does it take for you to press the delete button
and send those things into cyber space? As far as the web site
for the government, do you really expect them to actually do
anything to these guys? I don’t. I’ve been receiving e-mails and
letters from some official in Nigeria for over 20 years telling
me they have selected me as the person they would like to give
several millions of dollars to if I would just help them with
some scheme to get some money out of the country.
For years, we were told to send
those to the FBI or the Treasury Dept. along with a letter of
explanation. I bet I did that 25 times or more over these past
years…never received any reply from the government….still
getting the letters from Nigeria, only now I get them by e-mail
rather than by post office. If this has been going on for this
long and nothing has been done to stop them from coming, how can
we expect anyone to do anything about SPAM messages? You can’t.
Just suck it up and use the delete button on a daily basis.
Reminds me of someone telling me about some screw-up with some
cable company one night when they slipped in some porno movie by
mistake. Took my friend almost an hour to decide it should not
have been shown on television. When he complained to me, I asked
why he didn’t just change the channel or turn the television
off. Seems like the logical thing to do if you ask me.
Same thing with obscene phone
calls; of course with caller id I don’t think anyone gets that
many anymore. Must have put a dent in their activities. I’m
surprised someone hasn’t sued for one reason or another over
that happening. Anyway, when we owned our security company, we’d
get these calls all of the time wanting tips on how to handle
obscene callers. We’d tell them to hang up. You’d be surprised
how many people would tell me they never had thought of doing
that. We used to tell them to buy a whistle and blow it into the
phone, but then someone clued me in on someone getting sued in
California by some guy who claimed his hearing was permanently
damaged when he was making an obscene call to some out there….go
figure. Anyway, on the SPAM problem….just say no….hit the
delete.. Don’t sweat the small stuff.
