random thoughts – Day 1,548 – (Friday) – trash talk

In the early days of personal email, signing into my email account was exciting. First off, I had to be home at the desktop computer to do so. While out doing things like working or socializing live and in person, which is how life was back then, there was an underlying sense of anticipation. Do I have a new message? Is that person thinking about me?

During the stretch of the earlier fun times, two romances were conducted via the magical wonders of the still kind of new electronic mail. There was a Denver – Worcester situation (1998-99) that blossomed for a chunk of time with an old high school beau and included emails supplemented with late-night landline phone calls and personal visits requiring airline transportation before it all crash landed. The relationship, not the planes.

Another relationship began with Match of the dot-com before shifting to personal email. It started local and in person before a swift redirect to a Seoul – Worcester long distance situation (1999-2000) courtesy of the United States Army. That email enhanced romance involved lengthy daily letters peppered with song lyrics, recaps of the day, hopes, dreams, and future plans. There was international travel. There was longing. There was a marriage (X2) and then it all died in a 2007 split after the realities of real life together clashed with the misty romance of long-distance email promises.

Now, email is heavily weighted towards crap. Around 2011 I became suddenly popular, but it wasn’t a great thing. (You can read about it here if you want.) Back in that slightly more innocent time, my popularity was with magazine publishers trying to separate me from my heard-earned money. The short version – I subscribed to one magazine and soon dozens of others appeared in my inbox, uninvited. It felt kind of like when you see one creepy bird circling in the sky and then the others join until there are a bunch (flock? murder?) of them circling before they all descend to feast, and I was the feast.

These days, it’s even worse.

Current favorite.

Thanks to the scammers and spammers, there is a sense of dread when logging in to my email and the inbox shows 50 or 100 new messages. These are rarely from my friends writing to me. We text. We even text each other to alert of an incoming email, because, well, scammers.

A small percentage of the daily emails are news sources, member newsletters, and blogs to which I consciously and deliberately subscribed. A sliver are legitimate billing notifications from vendors accounts. The bulk of it is just crap, and that doesn’t even include the stuff that is automatically filtered to the spam folder for its obvious suspicious nature. Ugh. 

The spammers and scammers try to worm their way into my attention, wallet, and bank account with emails allegedly from warehouse stores, banks, utility companies, credit card companies, and stores with which I have never conducted business and which often do not even exist anywhere near my location. This week saw a trend with several messages each day from a generic individual’s name and a subject line about my alleged invoice for an alleged order. Sorry, not falling for it.

Gotta love the data breaches – publicized and otherwise – and the buyers and sellers of contact lists and personal information on the dark web. As if there aren’t enough things to worry about on a daily basis.

Getting “trashed” now has a different meaning than it did in college when it referred to the successfully achieved effects of drinking as a hobby. Instead of beer bottles (or a peace sign or smiley face or heart) the little digital trash can has become my favorite icon and trashing email is now a daily, time-consuming activity. In a lot of ways, I miss the old days.