Spam, Glorious Spam

I hate spam. At boarding school it was served at nearly every other evening meal, such that it became irritatingly familiar. And as you all know, familiarity breeds contempt. Why do I hate spam? Maybe it’s the taste which is bland, or perhaps it’s the texture which is featureless. I used to spice it up by blanketing it with ketchup, HP, Worcester, or chilli sauce. It was no use. I hate it but I ate it (apologies to Victor Borge)!

Nowadays spam refers less to SPiced hAM, and more to junk e-mail ... and I still hate spam. It mocks, it insults. No, I do not have a problem with the sturdiness of my thing, no I'm not so hard up that I need a blind date, no I am not balding, no I do not wish to enter your lucrative business venture in Nigeria, and yes I have legitimately acquired university degrees thank you very much.

Spammers are devilishly clever, if not downright wicked. Somehow they guess that my name is part of my e-mail address, so they paste that address onto their mail making it seem personal. They pretend that they are answering a query of mine, which of course I never sent. They masquerade as my banker, suggesting that there is a problem with my account. They pose as confirmation of an order which I never made on the internet. And worst of all, they simulate as returned e-mail that I never sent.

The nasty thing about spam is that they might harbor a virus or worm. I got caught once. It was absolutely stupid of me. I opened one of those .pif files, and let in a worm. That really piffed me off! It happened in the old days when I did not update my virus definitions regularly. It caused havoc with my computer and I lost some data. But it taught me a lesson, and nowadays I update my virus definitions obsessionally.

Article Author: Ken Lyen

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