So, as I sit here on my laptop at home, I ponder something. It's 1am...I'm done checking the usual stuff like e-mail before I go to...but wait...
Long ago, in a land far far...wait again...no, same place as now. Anyway...years ago, when I first moved in, I got the ole high-speed internet hooked up at the house. With said high-speed internet, you must sign up for an e-mail account in order to be able to login.
When I first moved here, I used this new e-mail address quite a bit. It was the primary form of e-mail communication for friends and family.
As I moved up the ranks of my current job, my work e-mail began to take precedent. I was at work a lot, so if you wanted to e-mail me and increase the liklihood of me seeing it and responding quicker, you sent it there. With the liberal job in which I partake, you could even send the stuff usually unsuitable for work, so no matter what you sent, I was pretty likely to get it in a timely fashion.
Eventually, the old home e-mail address, much like the home landline and corresponding telephone, became a thing of the past. Sort of.
You see...the e-mail address never really went away. It can't. It has to remain for as long as I have the account active. I forgot about that.
That led to my curiousity tonight. I don't even remember the last time I checked it. Turns out it was May 20th, 2004. Wanna know how I know? Because I've been getting e-mails ever since.
Not just "hey, what's up?" e-mails from friends. No one even has that address anymore for that kind of e-mail. You get a cookie if you guessed spam.
Spam. A...LOT...of...spam.
Nine thousand, nine hundred, and sixteen e-mails, to be exact. Even in digits it looks like a lot: 9,916.
Pretty much any type of spam you could think of. Porn. Meds. Penis Enlargement. Pregnant housewives getting railed while their husbands are at work. Big Naturals you have to see to believe...or so I'm told. Nearly 10,000 e-mails. Ten-freakin'-thousand.
I can't say I'm surprised. You leave an e-mail address idle for long, and you're bound to get blasted by the spammers of the internet underbelly.
At first, I thought it would be entertaining to go through them all eventually. I got about 250 in before I realized I should be institutionalized. So, I deleted them all. It took my browser nearly 8 minutes to compute that. I was curious so I counted. That's a long page-load-time. I'm just happy it didn't crash.
Here's hopin' that someone, somewhere, didn't only have that e-mail address for me, was reaching out after years of no contact, and hence caused me to miss the opportunity to get caught up with some long-lost love or friend. If you were buried under the spam, you were deleted. And for that, I'm sorry.
As to you, the rest of the e-mails in that inbox...
I $ay f.uc.k offf! @nd, save t.housands on ur m0rtg@ge!