John Y’s Musings from the Middle: Spam

Please!! Seriously! Would someone just contact this poor guy from Malaysia and take the $10M he has been trying to give away for the last decade —so he’ll quit filling up my (and others) email inbox and Facebook message box?

Here’s the latest from him. (see below) He’s been pursuing me under various identities for years. Sure, I’d love the money but it seems like such a hassle and then there are the tax consequences and having a new lifelong friend (named Godfrey Lau??). What would that entail? I am not ready to make that kind of commitment but am sure someone younger and more adventurous would. So, please, have at it. And help this poor Mr Lau out so he’ll leave the rest of us alone.

“My name is Mr. Godfrey Lau, an external auditor working with MayBank Malaysia. I have taken pains to find your contact through personal endeavors because a late investor who bears the same last name with you has left funds totaling a little over ( $10 Million ) with Our Bank for the past Eight years and no next of kin has come forward all these years. To affirm your willingness and cooperation to my proposal, I will like you to get back to me as soon as possible and treat with absolute confidentiality and sincerity.”

===

Ok. I don’t know what to think about this!!

In my post above I asked for someone to please, please help the poor guy from Malaysia who has been working feverishly for years to give someone in the US $10M for a little help on a minor matter.

I finally got someone to offer to do the job.

But her response seems suspicious to me:

“Hi,you got a nice looking profile picture that interest me to write… you for a mutual benefit,I must confess you look very attractive.I hope we can be friends?my email is(tfr19799@gmail.com)Regards,Tracey Fujikawa”

Heck, I can’t even be for sure she is responding to my request to help out this Malaysian feller. They both seem crazy as loons, though, if you ask me— and like they deserve each other.

===

Bad habits are like spam emails.

We sign up for them (both spam emails and bad habits) motivated by a  belief we are getting some reward without paying the usual price.

You can unsubscribe and think that the bad habit won’t return. But somehow the level of spam (bad habits) stays fairly consistent. And we don’t really know if the bad habits are the same old ones or some new and recently devel.ped bad habits.

Same with spam email. We aren’t  sure if the unsubscribe didn’t work or if we signed up for a new bad habit. I mean spam email. What I suspect is really going on with spam emails is that it is much harder to shake them off….to end them for good…with just a simple unsubscribe click after we have finally had enough.

Unsubscribing from spam emails —or ending a bad habit–is never that easy. And there always seems to be a disappointing number of them in my inbox at the end of each day. Spam emails, that is. And the filter to eliminate them works about as well as just trying to stop a bad habit. We may need to just embrace the fact that spam email will always be with us and focus instead on just eliminating our bad habits Or vice versa.