?!

Although, it was literally inspired by such. I’m not talking about the mystery meat that comes in a can, but rather the crap that continually bothers us through various channels of communication.

Ever since I started this blog, I’ve encountered “comment spam,” which, as the name implies, is where bogus comments are left on my blog. Luckily, I have discovered a spam-detection tool that checks every new comment to see if it might be spam, and then holds those comments hostage until I have a chance to approve or delete them. This utility, my dear readers, has kept your sensitive eyes from seeing ridiculous advertisements for pharmacutical-type products that are never pleasant to read about. Ever.

I was looking inside my Gmail account today, and I realized that I had a large amount of junk hiding in my spam folder. I decide to go in there and clean out the crap,  and I happened to notice one particular message. It claimed that I was the sender, which is the first sign that it’s not valid. The subject line was something like: “I haven’t talked to you in a long time.” For those of you that might not know this, Gmail also shows the first few words/lines of each email, and in this case it said: “Click here to read your message.”

Why… in the world… would I actually click on that email? There isn’t a SINGLE reason for me to click it, except to select it for deletion. But, for some reason, this kind of crap keeps coming in to my mailbox by the dozen. Someone actually puts forth effort into creating these emails, but for what cause? There must be enough people that will click on those stupid things to justify their existance…

As if that weren’t enough for one day, I came home tonight and found more junk in the snail-mailbox.

From the front, I didn’t think it was really valid. So I turned it over.

Admittedly, I read the majority of the text, and it seemed to be “to good to be true.” Then I glanced down at the bottom, which reads:

This is when I became irate. Why did they waste their time and mine on this stupid postcard? They blatantly lie, then TELL me that they’re lying, and then still expect me to respond?

I am absolutely baffled by the implied short-sightedness of those that try to get me to click their links or otherwise respond to their trash. However, I’m even more baffled at their implied success – if people weren’t behaving according to the spammers’ plans, the spam would stop.

So, your mission, should you choose to accept, is to NEVER, EVER, EVER click a link in a spam email or blog comment, and NEVER reply to the stupid timeshare people. If you fail, you will be a lemming… and I don’t talk to lemmings.