Jane Bland, Spam Magnet
2,000-year-old bread recipe will MAKE me lose weight! In addition, I will JUMBO size my PENIS and increase my ejaculation by 666% while my incredible two-week business opportunity makes me thousands of dollars. I will need legal Viagra because while all this is going on I’ll have so much free time I’ll want to cruise on over to RAPING FUN ON THE FARM. Before I do that, though, I’ll protect my computer privacy for only $12, of course.
I’m Jane Bland, and I’m a spam magnet.
I’ve been saving my e-mail for the past two weeks, to see what volume of e-mail I get in a selected time span. OK, OK, so initially I was going to write this about one week’s time span of e-mail, but I got distracted. Keeping a tidy in-box is not one of my strong suits. Keeping a tidy anything is not my strong suit. I seem to have a fondness for dust and genteel shabbiness.
I am a counter, one of those people who counts everything; number of steps in a staircase, number of grapes in a bag, number of breaths it takes to fall asleep. Counting e-mails is just another of my normal counting obsessions. I could probably be diagnosed obsessive/compulsive, except there is the dust and genteel shabbiness thing, which kind of cancels out the counting. Perhaps there is some enterprising bulk e-mail marketer who has a low-cost, moneymaking cure for all the above, that I could easily sell for thousands of dollars with little or no work. I have no doubt it will land in my in-box, if so.
Here’s the official two-week e-mail breakdown from the Jane Bland in-box.
Total e-mails: 512
From technical, informational and family mailing lists to which I voluntarily subscribe: 101
From friends: 90
From my husband: 84 (We sit close enough at our respective Macs to touch hands, yet we still e-mail. In fact, over a period of 20 months we have exchanged 3,168 e-mails, give or take a few. There were more than that, actually, but there was the time my hard drive crashed and had to be replaced, so I lost some, and some are stored on other computers. Those are just the ones saved on this particular hard drive. But I digress.)
Business related e-mails: 54
Forwarded jokes and/or inspirational stories I’ve heard before: 20
From the distant healing group I’ve been involved with since 1998: 8
From my ISP, announcing new service, virus warnings and technical updates: 5
From my publisher: 4
Order shipped confirmations: 2
New product announcements: 2
Political/activism: 2
Sent mail failure notices: 2
Fan mail: 2
Technical Magazine free subscription renewals: 1
Spam: 135
Warning, major digression coming up. Why is it, when people first get e-mail, they think that you, who have been receiving e-mail since Al Gore invented the internet, have never heard that particular joke, not signed that bogus petition, nor sent a postcard to that poor dying boy in England who is trying to set the Guinness world record for most postcards received before he dies? Do they really believe that if they don’t get the friendship e-mail back, it means I’m not their friend? Is it so terribly wrong of me to write them a polite e-mail requesting that IF they have the temerity to forward this kind of stuff to me, they don’t add my e-mail address to a long list of e-mail addresses on their forward list, which then gets passed around by other newbie emailers until my e-mail address has gone around the world sixteen billion times along with everyone else’s e-mail address? Is that too much to ask? Some people actually get offended when I write them a polite note, send them the hoax busters URL, and ask that in the future they write me a personal note rather than add me to their forward list. End major digression.
I’m Jane Bland and sometimes I’m polite, instead of sarcastic. Although I did have the evil thought that I might just start collecting all the e-mail addresses from this type of forwarded mail, then send all those people an Amazing Business Opportunity with the following disclaimer at the bottom: This is not spam. Your e-mail address was legally obtained from your moron friend (insert name of moron friend) who didn’t care enough about your privacy to delete it before sending it around the world sixteen billion times. But then, that wouldn’t be polite.
All right, back to my personal spam, which in it’s own crude way, actually does entertain. My very favorite spam is personalized, and comes with MANY exclamation marks!!!!!
Jane, bloussant…natural breast enhancement…MEN will LOOK!!!
Oh, goody. I sure do want that in my life, men staring at my huge American breasts. They can have a high old time at the bar saying things like, “Hey, you shudda seen the tits I saw yesterday. That ol’ gal musta been fifty if she was a day, had these gargantuan bazoombas hanging down to here!” Bubba points down to his knee where his JUMBO sized PENIS now hangs, limp and useless because his All Natural Viagra has yet to show up.
Jane, live 20 years longer with all natural HGH!!!
Oh, goody. Does that come with a fully paid nursing home insurance policy?
Jane, You’re THIN and BEAUTIFUL!!!!
*snort* To be effective, shouldn’t that read: Jane, You’re THIN and BEAUTIFUL and POTENTIALLY WEALTHY WITH THIS AMAZING PROGRAM and have STUPENDOUS BREASTS THAT WILL MAKE MEN LOOK!!!
Hello Jane Japanese lass sexy picture!
Scottish/Japanese, perhaps? If I click on this link will I automatically be bombarded with Asian porn? Man, if you think American spam is bad, wait until you get on the Asian porn lists, which come in with subject lines like ¡ÜȨÆäÀÌÃö æÀÛÀÌ 40¸¸¿ø!!!¼¼»ó¿¡¼ °¡Àå½Î´Ù!!!!!¡Ü[±¤.°Ã]. Whatever you do, don’t open it! I used to get one or two a week, and I made the fatal mistake of opening one to see if there were unsubscribe instructions. Now I average 30 a day.
Defend your family! Increase your business! Legal help for only pennies a day!
No, thanks! No, thanks! No, thanks!
And finally, (drum roll please), my all time favorite spam:
Jane, 8 white teeth can be yours.
Only 8? Not 9, or 10? What if I only have 7 teeth, can I still take advantage of this fabulous offer? I actually would have ordered the information, if I could have decided which 8 teeth I wanted white. Decisions, decisions. Don’t these people know that the secret to selling is to eliminate the guesswork for the consumer?
I’m Jane Bland, spam magnet. Until next time, buckle up, e-mail responsibly, and remember this sage advice when you might be tempted to open your spam: command, delete.
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