Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [64]
Unique Financial Opportunity from Deposed African Prince!
Spam comes from some anonymous, evil destination, not on any map, seemingly untethered to any legitimate corporation, media outlet, nation, or state. Spam seeps into your personal space, your workplace. Don’t waste your time, as I have, trying to unsubscribe, or to send nasty replies to spammers, or to track them down. I believe this only served to bring my name to the attention of millions of vengeful search bots, digital vermin whose ability to pester, mislead, and offend makes snake-oil salesmen of the nineteenth century seem quaint and virtuous. The inventor of the search bot had to have been an extremely bright and gifted person. Just as, I imagine, the inventor of a biological weapon is an extremely bright and gifted person. Too bad they didn’t apply their gifts elsewhere.
Wundercum for Massive Ejaculations!
All Eyes Will Be on the Monster in Your Shorts.
And so on. Sometimes the subject headings are legit enough to make me click, or at least think I should in case it is a real e-mail from a friend, acquaintance, or someone with a paying job. Lately I’ve also noticed a disturbing trend regarding the names in the From box. They contain aspects of, or slightly resemble, the names of the people with whom I regularly communicate. A friend in the business says this is also the work of the spam bots crawling around my hard drive, extracting any piece of information that can be used against me.
My wife doesn’t think it’s the work of bots. She thinks I’m crazy.
Still I wonder, do the spam masters think that after seeing their messages sixteen times a day for 221 consecutive days, I’ll finally have some kind of penile epiphany and decide, hey, maybe these people named Abraham R. Exion and (a personal favorite) Viceroy W. Woody are right? Maybe that is the root of all my problems. Maybe my life is the way it is because my watch really is crap, I don’t help enough deposed African kings, my penis is laughingly sub-gargantuan, and my ejaculations are not nearly as massive and geyser-like as those that a forty-eight-year-old who just celebrated his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary deserves.
Why not just give in and click through and write this person and send him my credit card and secure banking info and get this thing going? One would have to be a fool to get sucked in by their outrageous claims, right? Yet the ads never stop. So someone must be biting.
I barely finished deleting the last spam in my in-box when yet another message appeared to torment me and my beleaguered member.
She Will Bow Before Your Enormous Girth!
It is 8:29 a.m. I’ve been awake for approximately three hours. The impression tally now reads 87, but I know that a more liberal interpretation of the methodology could bring it closer to 500.
My in-box is flashing again.
For the first time, I’m feeling bombarded.
A Conservative and Extremely Rough Estimate of Online Ad Impressions for the Remainder of the Day
I’ll check my e-mail accounts again at lunch, before dinner, and before bed. I’ll goof around on the Fiction Files on MySpace for a half hour while not watching a kids’ show after dinner. I’ll Google myself on Google.de to see if there’s any news about The Futurist, which was published in Germany this week under the more German-friendly and optimism-repelling title No Future. I’ll decide that seeing your own name in the sponsored links doesn’t count, and that pop-up ads in German next to reviews of your book that you can’t understand don’t count, either. Friend requests from strangers pimping self-published books or indie bands do, though. I’ll also call up my iTunes page. The landing page for the iTunes Store has six medium-sized ads, eight postage-stamp-sized images of CD cover art, and a list of top new downloads, four of which make it onto my screen. Since I was whacked by thirty-two impressions the first time