The Spy Who Came In From CyberSpace
Click to view"If you have something you don't want people to know maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"
-Google Executive Chairman
The day the computer first came into our home it was 1994. It was bulky and white, with a puffy blue television screen and was the size of a small Backstreet boy. It literally took up the entire desk in our spare room. My wife and I carried it up two flights of stairs with the paramedics on speed dial and as Chrisanne laid it on the desk, she said in a great proud voice:
“You’re going to love this.”
She was right. Once I got over the incredible amount of noise it spewed as it attempted to connect itself to this internet thing, and the cats finally came back into the room assured they weren’t in line for a skinning, I was an internet surfing nut job. I found websites, I found pictures of Liza, I found chat rooms, and I found porn. And after I found the porn, the porn then found me. I wasn’t even looking for porn, but porn I found nonetheless. I am not one for naked pictures, I never have been. I like the real thing. But stumbling across cyberspace, in the old days, when computers were new and Google was a theory, simply clicking on “wet mop” would send you to a page of naked pole dancers.
And it has yet to stop.
I still open my e mail and occasionally get some penis thing, or lesbian thing, or some other strange website that has little to do with my University or my latest audition. And since then, I have wondered why. I have asked myself, and countless friends, why is this happening, and more importantly, how is this happening. If over a decade ago I visited a site that had something to do with wetness, and to this day I’m getting Wet Porn Mail, who exactly, is sending it to me? And whoever it is, they certainly don’t seem to care if I like it or not. And they don’t seem to notice that I keep trying to block them and report them and send them nasty responses, because let’s face it, they’re not really reading their own e mail. Whoever is doing this is less concerned about my personal feelings towards naked farm hands and their roosters, and much more concerned with their right to shove into my Inbox. I picture some dark corner of a warehouse with a demon possessed computer sitting at a desk all aone and typing furiously whilst sending out porn after porn after porn to unsuspecting elderly people like myself. Unfortunately for them, I simply have no interest. I have no interest and I have no time. I just want to surf the net and answer my e mail without naked confrontations.
Or pole dancers.
So, as my wife said to me years ago: I love it. I do love it. This computer has changed me and sent me into an informational age I never dreamed possible. I also know that there is a group of people who are very much aware of me. I don’t know if it’s the government, or Satan's little helpers, but someone's sending me stuff. When I lean towards the United States government, I can't logically put my finger on a specific culprit. Who exactly, would that be? Who got hired for Porn Mail? And how do they get paid? Is this a commission thing? I have to believe the government has better things to do than read my cat posts on Facebook. So then I go back to the demon computer; the one we all really blame, deep down inside. I think there's a general rule of thumb that when junk mail appears in anyone's inbox that it was sent there "automatically", as if that actually makes sense. I'm not sure which worries me more: The sex crazed government guy who has to lie about his job to his mother, or the 21st century unmanned computer that's eventually going to turn into Hal and crash the ship because we pissed him off. Either way, it's a bizarre concept and one that's been getting plenty of air play on Fox News. And whatever the reason for the new Penis Enlargement Pills I receive at the beginning of every month (I'm not sure what the beginning of the month has to do with having a larger wang, but punctuality seems to be paramount here), certainly someone or a group of someones, is aware of me. And now that I've continually deleted junk after junk after junk, I am aware of them.
As an interesting side note, after my wife's comment about how much love I was going to release for this new, overly bulky piece of Architecture in our house, she added:
“Make sure you don’t give out our address on this thing. I don’t want people spying on us.”