My father-in-law and mother-in-law came over for a while to exchange gifts today. Father-in-law got me a cool pullover jacket-type thing with the Atlanta Falcons logo on it. Since I’m a total nut for anything dealing with the Falcons, not to mention it’s a pretty good-looking jacket, I loved it. I thanked him profusely.
Then he said, “Yeah, I got it from one of those ‘spam’ things.”
I tried not to gape at him. As we all know, spammers are right down there with child-pornographers and puppy-torturers in the depths of Hell. I wanted to give him a lesson on not encouraging them, but (a) he’s not terribly computer-savvy and probably wouldn’t have listened, and (b) it was Christmas, so I kept my mouth shut.
Dammit, now I’m going to think about that whenever I wear that thing. I’ll have to rationalize it every time I put it on: “They’ve already got their money… Me wearing this doesn’t help them at all… Go Falcons…”
In seriousness, does he know precisely what he means when he says “spammer”? I myself once responded to unsolicited email marketing from a legitimate company, and ended up with a fantastic service at a very good price.
Actually that’s entirely possible. As I said, he’s not a terribly sophisticated Netizen; this could well have been something he agreed to receive at some point.
He called it “spam,” though, which sets my buzzers off much like the phrase “prostate exam.”
Heck, it’s impossible to get off the NFL’s marketing list. I bought one hat online from the NFL Shop and now I get several emails a month and a couple paper catalogs a year.
He’s probably registered on some NFL products website and they’re sending him sale email like 99.99 percent of web companies do, and for him email ad = spam.
