Now hold on there, I am not that old.
I mean World War II. And I only heard about spam from the old man and mum who, having lived through said war, seemed to know all about Yanks and spam.
So when the worldwide interweb first started getting some traction and people started speaking about spam again, for a short period of time I was a little confused and assumed somehow the meat confection must be making some sort of comeback as part of globalisation.
Wrong, Whacker, I had to tell myself as my knowledge of cyber space inched slowly forward.
Now, of course, if your computer is anything like mine you will be inundated with this garbage (which, my old man once told me, is exactly what the original spam was like on the one and only occasion he tried it).
Why else would they have resurrected the name for this new plague?
Anyhow, getting back to the point, I reckon many farming families are copping more than their fair share of spam as a result of the tyranny of distance.
Because we can’t duck into the city, or duck into anywhere with the nearest 50km or more, these days we tend to do a lot of our checking online.
And that, the experts warn, means by opening up connections to more sites we are opening up ourselves to more waves of spam.
Now your antivirus investment, your junk file and whatever else you may have on your computer and software of choice, means a fair bit of this garbage is stopped dead in its tracks.
Yet we still receive hundreds of these little suckers every week.
Just as an aside, if you are thinking the Whacker is suddenly sounding incredibly up-to-speed as far as cyberspace goes, it would be remiss if I did not mention one of the grandchildren is dictating much of this week’s Whackerumn.
But the thing I really wanted to discuss this week is the number of idiots who actually respond to this stuff.
Whether it is the promise of millions in stolen Nigerian money or a gorgeous woman in Russia who is desperate to become the wife you have been dreaming of – even though she knows you might be 40 years older than her and she weighs as much as your left leg.
Your financial standing has nothing to do with this arrangement.
But bugger me if people don’t fall for this crap week in and week out.
Sending money off by the truckload to help Natasha escape the bonds of some evil ex-KGB thug or, and I particularly love this one, sending all your banking details to Nigeria so you can help fund this refugee African prince and his bundles of cash out of the country.
Then you see these halfwits bobbing up on all those ridiculous current affairs – and we are using those words very loosely when using them in this context – showS bleating how they have been scammed.
Do tell.
Some of these greedy and/or stupid morons part with tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars and still don’t get it.
It horrifies me but I have to tell you I do have a mate (thrice divorced) on a beef property up the road who actually went as far as bringing one of these Russian damsels in distress to Australia – at his expense.
I gather all was going well until he actually took her bush and confessed he was a farmer.
When he woke up the next morning she was gone, his bank account was empty and she had left him a note saying: “If I had known you were a farmer I would have known this was a scam”.
