Two plates of spaghetti were thrown against my wall today. They were different flavors but essentially demonstrated the same phenomena of desperation and cluelessness. Neither had a chance of sticking.
This morning, I received two emails at an email address that was formerly listed on the US Embassy website in harvestable form. That address has been changed there to just my URL, but it’s been harvested before and anyone can go to my website to read the graphic of the email if they really want it. Two people today really wanted it.
One was a real estate broker wanting to sell me on “unlisted” condominium for about USD 1.7 million.
It was, of course, a non-personalized, shotgunned cold-call email.
Several minutes after that I received an email from a translator in Europe—a place on the Balkan peninsula to be a bit more specific—offering translation services in a variety of European language directions at about EU 0.027 per word.
His selling point was that he uses Trados, and his CV indicates that he does everything. I don’t mean that he claims to “do everything,” but rather that he lists the fields he can do, and it’s, basically, everything, in a large word cloud of unrelated fields.
Yes, desperation and cluelessness are the underlying themes in today’s emails that made it through my server-based spam filtering.