All war is based on deception.<\/em> \u2013 Sun Tzu<\/p>\n

Spam. We hate it. We curse it. We dread the moment, every morning, when we open our inbox to a flood of the most mundane, inane and insane group of drivel that a thousand monkeys typing at a thousand keyboards could hammer out. We CTRL click and hit Delete with prejudice as we wipe the contents from our hard drives, feeling the kind of dirty that a thousand showers can\u2019t wash away. When we meet at the coffee machine, we share our horror stories in a Kumbayah-inspired moment with our coworkers. And just when we think it\u2019s safe to go back into cyberspace, we get home at night only to be barraged with a whole new set of crayon-inspired messages from pretend deposed princes, fake ailing widows and shady imaginary lawyers.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s an honest, Steve Jobs-fearing IT professional to do? It seems that we can\u2019t wipe away the dirt, no matter how much effort we put into it. In a war that appears to have no discernable end, we might be inspired to move to a desert island and reinvent the Internet using a couple of coconuts strung together with twine and connected to iPads fabricated out of bamboo; but that\u2019s not practical and batteries made of bananas just don\u2019t pack the same power as Li-ion polymer. Besides \u2013 and sorry for the generalization \u2013 most tech people don\u2019t do sun very well and the rich tan of a desert island is sparse solace compared to the pasty white glow we work so hard to nurture as we\u2019re bathed in the glow of our<\/em> tanning beds \u2013 computer monitors. We toil away in our organization\u2019s headquarters, buried deep underground like so many orcs and trolls, as if they put us there to contain us and make us prisoners. All the while, we curse spam and hate it for what it represents.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t Hate the Player \u2013 Hate the Game<\/strong><\/h2>\n

I don’t know why a player wanna hate T<\/em> <\/em>
\nI didn’t choose the game, the game chose me <\/em>\u2013 Ice T<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to dole out the significant amount of spite we feel toward the individuals who concoct these ridiculous schemes. It\u2019s more difficult to accept the fact that the game, for lack of a better word, wasn\u2019t devised by any one person. A game is what spam has become, the sheer mediocrity of the schemes making it all-too-obvious that while a great deal of thought and planning has not<\/em> gone into most of them, these schemes are still somehow designed to defeat us. At very least, they irritate, a mosquito that just can\u2019t be swatted. At very worst, they are effective enough<\/a> to cause some serious damage, both financially and organizationally.<\/p>\n

It would be wrong to hate any one individual who targets us, the same way it would be wrong to turn down a meal because there was broccoli on the plate and you didn\u2019t like broccoli. Even if the meal is terrible, hating broccoli won\u2019t really help you know that the meal is terrible. Indeed, if there is any one thing worth hating, it\u2019s the way that spam has infiltrated our society like the social disease it is. The less savory qualities of humanity \u2013 greed, deception, indifference, apathy \u2013 are the true villains here and truly worthy of our disgust.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Okay to be Bad \u2013 Just Don\u2019t be Seen<\/strong><\/h2>\n

 If the enemy is in range, so are you.<\/em> \u2013 Murphy\u2019s Laws of Combat<\/p>\n

If spam has taught us anything over the handful of years it\u2019s been around, it\u2019s that the worse the spam, the better it is. I\u2019m using \u2018bad\u2019 here not in the sense of malevolence, but in the sense of ineptitude. If spam truly is a game \u2013 and I believe it is \u2013 then it\u2019s no secret that spammers are the worst gamers in history. I hope someday to meet all of them on the battlefield in Call of Duty<\/em> because there are some easy XPs there, and I could work off some frustration at the incalculable hours spent dealing with their frivolous crap.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s because spam\u2019s so bad<\/em> that it\u2019s actually good<\/em>. Spam is so obvious that it would be laughable \u2013 if it didn\u2019t give us headaches. Unfortunately, we may be facing a world of hurt in the future, because the spammers are getting better<\/a> at what they do. Let\u2019s face it: we shouldn\u2019t worry about the enemies we can see coming. It\u2019s the ones we can\u2019t see that should concern us.<\/p>\n

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