MIchael: The Women of Spam

 

Fields of golden grass

Cover the rolling hillsides

Of our daily walks.

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

 


Every couple of days, in my spam folder, I get mail from various women or various websites making it clear that I am a very popular man who could easily have no strings attached sex just about any time I wanted to.



I’m not sure how this all came about except that before I was married, I was on some dating sites. I’m presuming one of those opened the window of opportunity for all of these spammers.



All of this mail has been quickly deleted except one, and that one I got last week. This email began Haven and in the header it said, “It’s Mary, remember me? We were friends in high school…” Wow! That took me back for a minute. Mary was the name of my high school sweetheart. We dated for two years before she was smart enough to dump me right when she started college.



This, I thought, was the most clever ruse yet and one that I had never received before; using a familiar name within a large enough time frame to have at least a decent probability of being at least vaguely accurate. But the claim that “we were friends” wasn’t going to work. It’s just not specific enough. Now if it had said, “It’s Mary. Remember me? You were that geeky little pimply faced bastard that for reasons unknown I allowed to treat me awkwardly and obnoxiously for over two years in high school.” Then I would’ve opened one of those spam invites for the first time and they could’ve hacked or infected my computer and I would’ve given them credit for being clever con people.