Spammed or Not

Last week, friday to be exact, I was at work finishing up a long busy day (most of my days are like this now which is odd because last year I could actually feel my cells dying and being born I was so bored), and lo and behold I get one of the many spam emails that periodically show up at my work address. Normally they come right into the spam filter and get stuffed in a folder. This nice little folder is like a frog eating flies on a lily pad: it snatches up spam before I even know it's there. But sure enough sometimes those adds for VnAGra pop right through anyway. (now that I see it written that way I feel subconsciously drawn to go get some Viagra, hmmm, it must be working)

But this one was sort of odd. the typing was all intermittent and it was asking me for help, saying it "had no voice box and could not speak, but no trach tube. Can you help?" I forwarded it along to my good friend Clembie who at first said the woman had ALS (lou Gehrig's disease) but that it was probably some sort of spam. So I played around and kept asking the spam program questions. It usually gave the exact same broken english response, and didn't answer my questions. So finally I just asked it where it got my email address...and suddenly it broke pattern and said "from the BCEI.org Genentech website"

I sat there spell bound and sorta creeped out as I realized this really was a person and the poor woman was reaching out for help. Here I was messing around convinced it couldn't be real. So why is the website suddenly such a key? Because I'm the webmaster for that site, have an email address that is linked to a mailbox that isn't my normal one but still check, and most importantly, that that thing NEVER misses spam. So this is definitely a real person and she's definitely asking for help. I then told her I am just a drone and not a real doctor. She thanked me and that was that.

Crazy, the internet makes us such skeptics, and for good reason what with all the scams and viruses and identity theft. But very sad nonetheless that our humanity gets so wapred that a person can't really ask for help using pretty much the only means available to her.

Make no mistake, there is still a part of me that thinks it's all just someone messing around. And so the circle of second guessing goes on and on and on. Oh well.