In recent weeks, I’ve become quietly convinced that someone is trying to spam me by signing me up for mailing lists; I’ve had three or four different waves of spam mails just pile up in my inbox, on a quasi-regular basis — always during the recording of the Wait, What? podcast, curiously enough — and I’ve started to get just that little tiny bit paranoid about it.
It could be nothing, of course; it might just be a very strange couple of coincidence and nothing more. But the more I wonder about it, the more I find myself thinking just how wonderfully devious it would be, to do such a thing; how good an untraceable prank, or sneaky a trick, it would be to just sign people up to multiple spam lists and knowing that their inbox would soon be filled with everything from multiple messages from Entertainment Weekly and associated publications — there are so, so many, dear reader — to any number of people offering to take care of legal problems that I most assuredly don’t have. (Also, offering these services to someone whose name isn’t mine, but that’s perhaps beside the point.)
It’s very possible that I’m getting all this spam because my email address has traveled through PR companies or comic book conventions to some mailing list or another, and then been sold onto a third party vendor and beyond; I know that’s happened to other people, and I’ve been around enough to surely be on far too many lists of journalist emails by this point not to get caught up in some kind of a net. There really might be a perfectly innocent — or, at least, not malicious — explanation for the waves of spam messages I’ve gone through.
If there is, though, I’d almost be disappointed. Don’t get me wrong; I hate dealing with the sudden influx of spam and wouldn’t be disappointed if I never had to do that ever again. But, in an entirely perverse way, I like the idea that someone, somewhere, decided that this was the way they wanted to fuck with me, knowing just how low-level frustrating it would turn out to be.