As I cruised through my email, my spam box caught my attention. As of today, I have 584 emails in my spam box, having cleaned it out only a month before. I decided to take a judicious sampling of these emails, in case some vitally important information had been sandwiched between offers of free cars, free cell phones, free porn, and free spam.

The first email that caught my attention claimed, as far as I could tell with the atrocious spelling, that I had a 1 in 2 chance of winning a Playstation 3. Now, setting aside the fact that this is strictly opposed to every moral sense I have, or rather every moral sense that I allow to speak when I have nothing else to do, there is a facet of basic mathematics that does not make sense here. Let us say that 10,000 people respond to this spam. This is likely an underestimate. Therefore, about 5,000 should win, and since the Playstation 3 costs $499 at its cheapest, they would end up paying approximately $2,495,000 for these Playstations. So, thus, I may expect to get, at most, a shiny box, plus the malware of my choice.

The next email tells me that, apparently, I have a pressing need for Viagra to enter my life. Now, I must admit that I was a bit incensed at this. Firstly, these people have not even bothered to identify my gender. Secondly, even if I were male, why do you assume I would need said assistance? Do you know me? How can you doubt my theoretical virility from that far a distance? This email is discarded without further ado.

I continued to skim through, but there was nothing novel, nothing original, nothing that inspired me to gaze into the depths of their virus-ridden souls. However, when I saw an email that offered me a free copy of Halo 3 if I replied within the next week, I grew interested. As a matter of fact, this game is the one object that I need to make my life complete. My life savings are going towards this game. However, as the game comes out on September 25th, I am forced to doubt the veracity of this claim.

I browsed further, but I gained no other fresh insights. I therefore emptied my spam box with all haste. However, checking my email the next day, I found 57 new spam messages. Their persistence is really quite admirable.

AotA signing off.