Friday, March 5, 2010

Miseria, Rhymes with Nigeria

On March 2, 2010 an anonymous Nigerian infiltrated my Gmail accounts, both of them, and deleted all my emails and contacts. "He" (although to be fair and balanced he could have been a "she"...uh, yeah right) sent emails to my friends, family, acquaintances, associates, members, ex's, and even those random Craig's List reply coded emails like sale-2x7ocv-9276502@craigslist.org. Don't bother checking, the lawn mower has already been sold. In other words, everybody in my contact list...which numbered 2682+. I know this because I backed it up on March 1...thank you angels!

The scam, spam, phisher man email was sent as if it were from me, and he sent it from both of my Gmail accounts, so people got it twice, which in a way is good, because it gave it the subtle, if not over-salty, flavor of spam.

I feel bad for those poor victims, and you, if you are one of them. They received an email from "me" entitled "i need your help." It was signed "Lori" and the body of the email informed them i was at a funeral in England and i needed money. And if you're wondering why I don't feel "badly" it is because this event did not impair the nerves in my hands...but that's another hammer to pound.

As it happens, my friends who are least able to afford it were the ones who offered to send me money. I gained comfort in knowing my friends would do that for me, even though I probably would have spent the money on a round of black and tans for the whole pub, so if I'm in England, don't send me money...unless i use a capital I...because if I can't shift, I'm drunk.

I would NEVER use a lower case i when referring to myself. I can't even stand it when YOU use lower case i, but that's not my point. My point is I don't talk like this: "How are you today? I hope everything's alright. Please I need you to help me out with something. Can I get a loan from you very urgently? I`ll reimburse you under a week, I promise. I need to solve some personal problems at hand which have been giving me great worries. I`d also prefer if we discuss this through email as I`m presently in England for a friend's funeral. I`m sorry if I didn`t inform you about it, but please try and understand. I`ll let you know how much I need if you are willing to assist me. Thanks, Lori"

I`m "presently" at a friend's funeral?...problems "at hand"? Who talks like that? The syntax, the vocabulary, the staccato, it sounds like C3PO is translating for Yoda. And what's with those backwards apostrophes? They are much too left-leaning for my taste. By the way, it's that key on the upper left side of the keyboard, under the muy pequeño tilde. As far as I'm concerned that key's only function is to indicate THIS EMAIL IS NOT FROM LORI!

Anywhays (and this is as good a place as any for me to introduce you to my little friend "anywhays"--the mutant spawn of anywho and anyways) as I was saying, it was apparent from the every first LETTER that this letter was not from me. Trust me on this, if I can't hit the shift key, it means I am at the funeral of my left pinkie. No amount of money is going to bring that finger back.

Speaking of fingers, I have a special one for GMail and the folks at Google...who I am presently no longer a fan of...dangle, dangle...because they let me down after I entrusted them with my cyber-journal-of-life which is not this blog, but my email archives. This blog is where I blather and flail in a way that gives us all a chance to chuckle about how life sucks, but my emails were dated and time-stamped correspondence between me and the whirled. I trusted you, Google, to store my precious letters in a sturdy box under the bed...or better yet, on a secure server with state of the art backup technology. I guess the box would have been safer, huh.

Now what? Now I wait. I wait to see if the lowly Niger goes the extra mile and steals my identity. And if he does, there WILL be a funeral, only it will be in Nigeria, not England. And it won't be a person, or a pinkie finger, it will be an IP address. This one: 41.155.83.93 or this one: 41.155.6.97, or this one: 41.155.102.137, or this one: 41.155.51.195. Or maybe all of them. They'll call it The Great 41.155-o-cide of 2010.

If you are a White Hat hacker, would you please take this Black Hat a-hole down? But first, grab the box under the bed and return my life to me. I am saying this most humbly, "i need your help."

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