Spam I Am

Do you want to be happy every day?

Save your money and time. Don’t miss the chance of your life!

Just trust me and life will change to better immediately. Just do it! You won’t be disappointed!

I want to help you with your infernal ache. I know the place where you can buy the best drugs.

The preceeding statements were made in my name, but I had nothing to do with them.

My email contact list was hijacked recently so everybody on it received messages about the secrets of sexual attraction, were told that sex is the only satisfaction, and advised that “OMG! I have never had such a long sex!” and “LOL! It’s the funniest thing in the world!”

Only it wasn’t funny at all. It was downright creepy. I got messages from so many people demanding to know what the hell going on. There’s nothing quite like having an ex-girlfriend writing to find out why you sent her an ad for cheap Viagra.

The only satisfaction for me would have been finding the idiots responsible for this spam-icide and inflicting them with an infernal ache that could never be cured—even with the best drugs.

I changed my email password as soon as I learned what was going on. I sent out emails explaining the situation, but I realized that there were a number of people on my contact list with whom I have had no contact at all. I’m not even sure who some of them are.

I suspect that this breach may have occurred during my vacation when I was using various hotel computers. That’ll teach me to monkey around with the Internet while I’m traveling.

A recent New York Times article said spam is still on the menu, despite filtering technologies, legal investigations, and convictions.

“Seven years after the famous prediction by Bill Gates, then chairman of Microsoft, that spam would be eradicated in just two years,” the story said, “about 90 percent of all e-mail is spam.”

I’m so glad that the world didn’t come to an end on Saturday as these rapture loons had been predicting. Oy vey iz mir, I have enough sins on my slate already without having to explain to the Lord why I was sending out pornographic emails. (I wrote about these people last year. )

And it didn’t help that on this very same day I went to my local grocery store and rang up a bill for—I swear to God—$6.66. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten that beef jerky.

I thought for sure that with a number like that my number would be up and I’d have an eternal infernal ache, but then a funny thing happened on the way to Armageddon—it didn’t happen.

Shocking, no?

Apparently humanity is hard to eradicate--just like spam.

A few hours after the world was supposed to have ended, I was walking through the Atlantic Avenue subway station when I saw a group of Mennonites singing hymns in the passageway where 24 hours earlier one of the rapture artists had been handing out pamphlets.

These people were so white, so incredibly Caucasian, they were almost glowing. It looked as if they had been raptured straight out of Kansas and dumped into Brooklyn.

But they seemed nice and they sang their hymns so beautifully. One of them even gave me a free CD. Unfortunately, the CD came with this little handout that went on about the lake of fire and the wages of sin. At least the music was pleasant.

I have to admit that some good came out of all this e-monkey business. I had a nice exchange with my ex and I got a call from a friend of mine whom I had not spoken with in years.

I surprised to hear from him—I hadn’t made the spam connection yet—and we were having a great conversation when my friend shifted gears and said, “by the way, I got this email from you…”

LOL! It was the funniest thing in the world!