Mar. 05, 2003 - 19:10 MST

THE WONDERING JEW

Cloverexx

When I was a kid:

There were many magazines with pages of perhaps 1/2 inch ads offering kids and those older folk ignorant of the world's scams, almost the moon or Brooklyn Bridge -- some even a combination of both, like bicycles, 22 rifles, Daisy air guns, things precious to a kid would be given, if only, something was done to earn said item. For the most part the goal was truly unattainable. I remember trying to sell packets of seeds, Cloverexx salve and other stuff.

Those endeavors could have had a happy ending, except, most all of us kids were pushing the same things with the idea of obtaining our longed for item by our superhuman powers of selling.

Most of us had a modicum of support, Moms, Dads, Grandmas, Grandpas, uncles, aunts and adult cousins. Of course some of the aforementioned relatives had scads of us young kin all singing the same siren song. Things could be tough as the hard part was paying for the consignment yet unsold.

Then, as we aged a bit we fell for those "Work at home and make big bucks," thingys. Stuff envelopes, send $25 dollars for our kit and make thousands off selling the finished products, all different things that on second intelligent look were ways for lazy entrepreneurs to suck us dummies into paying for almost nothing in return. We found out that easy money wasn't very easy for us.

Essentially the same is in effect today only on a much larger scale. The magic of the internet and e-mail has opened the world to the same types of skullduggery on a much larger scale. But there are so many more dinging at us using the same old type of thing. I dump at least 125 spams a day.

Thinking about it, there might be just a few of us who haven't learned about such things yet.

1,000,000 spam mails offering something for $10.00 - - - -

.001 response per million equals 10,000 suckers @ 10 bucks each eqals $100,000.00, not a bad return for sending spam by a list. Now, with that same sucker list of addys the dear spammer can spam over and over again for the "pie in the sky" products that are essentially worthless. Economical to the max to do so for them as they don't have to pay bulk mail postage. Now I understand why my snail mail stuff is trickling down to nothing almost. Easy on my wastebasket but spam steals my time nevertheless.

If I could get a penny for each those 125 spams I would be getting $1.25 I think -- whatever, it would be gravy and I would be out trying to get on more sucker lists hoping to be a millionaire by just deleting spam all day !

Gee, I could make big bucks by spamming for Cloverexx . . . . . . . . . . .

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