Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Die, dirty dogs

I remembered to check the "feedback" email for my old website this evening. "Feedback" gets scare quotes because it's only truly feedback if you consider spam robots visitors and if you count spam as comments. Out of 1000-some odd messages, I'd guess 800 followed the pattern of:

Get you/'re bachelor/'s! Your busines dreams can be realize but only with a degree!!!11!
And then there's a phone number to call, with gramatically inept directions on precisely how to leave my name and contact information because this offer is too good to miss! I feel bad, really, that I deleted the whole heap before thinking to copy a phone number so I could share the inside line to a fast-track degree. I guess C1al1s S0ftab5 are sooo last quarter. Speaking of quartering, that's what we should do with spammers! Seriously, if I'm not going to respond to one pathetic email why would I respond to any of the next 30 with the same, exact words from the same, exact place? If you knocked at my door that many times our relationship would progress rapidly to door-slamming and then punching of face.

The one email (again, out of over a thousand) that I saw from a real live person was a request to be removed from my mailing list. Which means, sickeningly, that my contact form has been used recently to spam people other than me, and at least one poor guy thinks I'm the one who did it. "Pissed" would be a good way to describe the way that makes me feel, and "deleted" would be a good way to describe my contact form and anything attached to it. So if any of my site's four visitors ever want to contact me again... tough, because I won't sift through trash knowing others are getting it on account of me, too. But hey, that's the way it goes, Electronic Mass Marketing is a dog-eat-dog industry. I just wish all the filthy rat-dogs would eat each other already and leave my stuff alone.

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