 Column - Commentary They deliver, for you!By DAVE KIFFERDecember 24, 2022
It's that time of the year when my SPAM box is full of shipping scams. Either that or I woke up one night at 3 am and ordered every possible item that was on sale in the Lower 48 at that very moment. I have no memory of that. But then, I have no memory of anything I was doing twenty minutes ago. Go figure. This morning alone, my SPAM box had about a two dozen different messages regarding packages that were waiting to be sent, were on their way, or had already arrived (and hadn't been successfully delivered). It was as if I went out to our mail box and found it stuffed with "undelivered" notices from the USPS. Speaking of which. Dear shippers. Stop sending me things that require a signature to be delivered. It means I have to go to the post office and stand in line for about three years. I don't want to do that. I will stop ordering from you. Any one else that sends me a "return receipt required" I probably don't want to hear from anyway. But I digress. Of course, I have to at least briefly scan everything (but not click on any links) to make sure these messages are indeed SPAM. Every so often the algorithm that decides what goes where screws up and an important message gets buried in my junk file. I feel like I spend at least an hour every day trolling my junk and deleted files to make sure that I have not missed a message to me that I REALLY HAVE won millions of dollars in a contest I knew nothing about. Fortunately, I have my bank account number, social security number, mother's maiden name, name of the street I grew up on and the eye colors of my three (sic) children ready to deploy if necessary because that is all there is between me and my important package arriving safely. That way my "important personal" information can be "delivered" to either an offshore bank or a bunker in the Ukraine. Speaking of which, the only positive I can think about the horrible War in Ukraine is that the number of scams from that country (I used to get multiple Ukrainian based scams every week) has clearly gone down. Maybe Russia should invade Nigeria next. But I digress, again. I guess I wonder how many people actually fall for these scams. It seems like it would be darn few, but then if you send out a million bogus emails and 10 people respond to it, it probably pays for your time, which is a sorry indictment of modern life in general, I suppose. It also makes things worse that the companies we are actually trying to do business with are the cause of this in the first place. Where do the "evil doers" get enough of our "personal information" to "reach out and touch" us anyway? Yes, yes, I know that just about every company's notice "terms and conditions" has some sort of boilerplate about not "selling" someone's personal information to other companies and most generally do a pretty good job of keeping sensitive financial info under wraps (except for those embarrassing little hacking episodes we hear about). But they do sell our names. How do I know? Quite a few years ago, I got tired when one of the companies I frequently purchase products from kept sending me messages asking to be able to contact me with "offers" of "retail wonders beyond all imagination." Okay, they didn't phrase it that way, but that was the gist. Finally, I signed up for future notices under the name of Dave Kyieeffeer. Oddly enough, I never received any further offers of retail wonders beyond all imagination from that particular company, whom I still shop with. But in the past decade, just about once a year, I get an occasional SPAM email addressed to Mr. Dave Kyieeffeer. Or Mr. Kyieeffeer. Or Sir Kyieffeer. I kind of like that last one. Including one just two weeks ago of the "we can't find you to deliver your important package to you" messages. There's a reason for that.
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Contact Dave at dave@sitnews.us Dave Kiffer is a freelance
writer living in Ketchikan, Alaska.
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