Fleas, Spam and Other Serial Pests (11 March)

 

I was listening to the radio today and they were talking about grass ticks. There is a plague of them in various parts of Sydney. One person rang in and regaled listeners with his problems in trying to get rid of the pests. His family had been for a walk in the bush. When they got home the kids were covered in nasty welts and days later, the nasty little bugs were still annoying the life out of them.

 

The ticks tenacity and level of annoyance reminded me of the scourge of modern day communications; SPAM. If you use email you know all about spam.

 

Even good spam filters are not infallible and checking to make sure real emails are not caught is necessary. I get all the usual contenders. People I have never heard of in North Botswana or Upper Mongolia who want to give me millions. Universities that I have not attended who will give me a medical degree so I can carry out lobotomies on bad winemakers. Credit Card companies that will provide me unlimited credit, even though I am an undischarged bankrupt, and haven’t worked a single day of my miserable existence. Strange people who guarantee to defy the laws of nature and expand a certain part of my anatomy.

 

But the one I admire most is the lady who want’s to talk to me. She always starts off her emails with “I am tired tonight….” Good lord! I can just see it now. You ring the number at the equivalent cost of a bottle of Grange (per minute) to talk to the “dish.” There is a hot and sexy voice at the other end. But wait. The reality is the “dish” is a 75 year old great grandmother who weighs as much as an adolescent rhino, with a breath to match. She is sitting there in her fluffy powder blue slippers, doing her knitting, whilst whispering sweet nothings into your ear via her Bluetooth cordless headset. Let’s face it, only a moron would pay to ring a bird who admits to being tired. If you ask for phone sex, she will probably tell you she has a headache.

 

But I digress. These examples of spam are con jobs aimed at fleecing the gullible from their hard earned readies. They invariably come from faked email addresses and refer you to websites that cease to exist in less time than it takes to get rid of an Indian call centre phone salesman. As well as the joys of the con to consumer spam, any business with a published email address can also look forward to business to business spam also. Just today I received an initiation, in Italian, to attend some plonk event in Turin. I also receive all sorts of other unsolicited emails from wine businesses, but being legitimate, these guys respect the unsubscribe function. When asked not to be contacted again, they respect your wishes.

 

There is one wine business, supposedly legitimate, that does not respect emails asking to be unsubscribed. These guys are more persistent than grass ticks. They are more like paralysis ticks, or leaches. Once they get your email address they never give up, they never go away, and like fleas keep coming back. No matter how much they are not wanted, you can’t get rid of the buggers.

 

Let’s face it, I don’t make wine and I have no desire to pay to have some flea pit mob in China to promote my wine, the wine that I do not make or sell, in China. Do these bloody, serial pests ever get the message? Not on your life. The emails just keep coming, and coming, and coming. So, if you are going to try and do wine business in China, what ever you do, don’t use bom-wine.com and ignore emails from international@WEI.net They are about as kosher as a pig in lobster sauce, smell as much as week-old, unrefrigerated, unprocessed meat and are harder to get rid of than ticks.

 

Pity the US can’t precision bomb No.39 Gucheng Rd. Nanning, Guangxi with Frontline.

 

 

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Copyright © Ric Einstein 2008