Spam, Glorious Spam! Hot Amateur Webcams!

Short tale of a codemonkey's woe.

Spam. Wonderful spam. Or so the song goes. Of course, the song refers to the tinned processed meat rather than unwanted communication. As I sit here, in the docks, listening to the prosecution, I wonder why I did it. It started off as an experiment in A.I., and now I'm facing charges of electronic terrorism.

It started, about two years ago, as I sat at my desk typing lines of code, when I stopped to check my email. After deleting 920 useless messages, I happened upon a theory forming itself in my head.

What if spam had sentience?

If spam had sentience, then could act as a filter for itself. It would know what spam would be most useful to you, and although you still may not want those messages, they'd still be more useful to you than 'Add 3” to your length!'. It could make sure spam was from approved companies, rather than from just any b*****d with a keyboard.

So I began. I took all my knowledge of the programming languages, opened up notepad and started to type. By the time I finished, my fingers had blisters. I saved it as a system file, and sent it on the spam trail. I turned off the computer and went to the pub.

The next afternoon I woke up and turned on my computer. Checking for email, I found several pointless but directed spam. It appeared to work, and at the bottom of each email was a little question- 'is this of any use to you?', with 'yes' and 'no' radio buttons. Below the questions was a further radio button- 'stop spamming me'.

All was going well. Reports on tech websites claimed spam had been reduced by 47%. There was much rejoicing, parties in the streets, yadda yadda. I smiled with a smooth sense of pride at my achievements. I had done what I set out to do. Of course, then someone selected the third option below the question.

The spam took this as a personal insult, believing to be a refusal to accept its existence. At first it moped, not sending spam to anybody. Then it took action. As more and more people selected the third option, it went to war.

It flooded inbox after inbox with useless spam. Advertising child pornography and signing businessmen up to steaminghotsex.com, it turned nasty. The next time I opened my inbox it contained 42,000 spam mail. Not realising what was happening at this point, I selected the third option.

So it shopped me to the authorities. I got grassed on by spam.

Now I sit here, listening to the opening speech of the prosecution, waiting for my defence to pipe up. If I don't get lynched by angry geeks, I'll probably be looking at the world from behind bars for a long time.

I'm going to plead insanity.

Author's Note

Not something I'm particularly proud of, just something I came up with toward the end of a week-long bout of insomnia a couple of years back. In other words, I don't think of it as a real example of my writing, but I feel I should put something up now rather than later. Oh, and hi! My name is Mike B, and I haven't drunk anything in over a week. Dying of dehydration, I'm starting to thinks this extreme tee-totalling is a bad idea.