The Muddled Male

Opportunities Lost

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

         Recently I had to go into the mysterious inner-workings of my email accounts and make changes to their settings because my internet provider decided to change over from using their own servers to using ones owned and maintained by Google.  To help each customer in his or her attempt to make the change, the internet provider was kind enough to email a set of detailed instructions to the holder of each account in their system.  Well, I have five different devices where I receive emails and the instructions worked fine for only three of the five.  The last two forced me to call tech’ rep’s and admit that I was an old man who realized that part of the technical world had just passed me by.  Such an admission wouldn’t have caused me any embarrassment except that one of the tech’ rep’s was a nice young girl who sounded young enough to be my granddaughter.  What was worse, she said, “Mr. Stevens, would you like me to just operate your computer remotely and make the changes for you while you watch?”

            I tell you this complicated story as a way of explaining what happened next.  After making the necessary changes (while I watched helplessly) this helpful young lady sent an email from my computer to hers to check the outgoing email function, and then sent an email from her system to mine to check the incoming email function.  Finally she asked me to scan through all my email account folders and make certain that everything appeared to be functioning properly.  That is when I first noticed a problem.  Where once there had been no emails in my email account because I had cleaned them out.  Now there were three hundred and fifty eight because the internet provider’s system had saved all of the old emails that I had deleted and then dumped them back onto my computer once we finished making changes to my account settings.

            “No problem,” said the young lady who is smarter than me, “Just delete them all again.”  Well an anally-retentive engineer doesn’t just delete records blindly, so I started going through them and deleting them one by one, and that was when I found two emails written by different ladies currently living in Malaysia.  One had married a prince who had died and left her a lot of money she needed to deposit in some American’s bank account or she would lose it.  The other had married a rich man who died of cancer, left her millions of dollars, and now she is dying of cancer and wanted to send lots of money to someone who would make certain that the money was used in a Christian-like fashion.  All she needed from me was my social security and bank account numbers and she would deposit twenty-five million dollars in my bank account for me to use as I saw fit.  I was preparing my information to be transmitted when Ann, my wife, became aware of my activities and said in a rather abrupt voice, “ARE YOU CRAZY?”  She said it so loudly and in such an angry tone that now everyone knows that Ann is also smarter than me.

            But just think what good I could do with twenty-five million dollars.  I might even consider giving some to you if you promise to use it for a good cause.  Just send me your social security and bank account numbers and I’ll see what I can do.