Spam and Eggs

Remember the bad old days when the price of gas was about the same as the price of a dozen eggs? And that was something quite remarkable, when you think about it, considering what’s involved in extraction and refining and transportation. Now eggs have doubled in price, which suggests that Joe Biden also shut down a proposed pipeline that would have gently moved hundreds of thousands of eggs to market, affecting the delicate psychology of egg production and exploration. Had we banned egg-laying on more federal lands? Canceled leases on offshore projects that would have housed great squawking, stinking flocks of chickens on platforms in the sea? Was the National Yolk Reserve being tapped, with millions of eggs shipped to China?

Anyway. I’m not here to complain about egg prices. Nothing I can do. Not even Pete Buttigieg suggests we buy an electric chicken. Nor am I complaining about energy prices. I got a letter the other day from the power company, telling me how much energy I used compared with others in the general vicinity. Eh. All my lights are LEDs, which supposedly sip power like a spinster nursing her Easter brandy. The letter went right into the trash.

For that matter, all the mail goes into the trash. (Except for the letters offering cremation services, which go into the fire pit.) I subscribe to a USPS feature called “Informed Delivery,” which sends an email every morning detailing the useless sheafs that will arrive later, to the dog’s great distress. Every day I tread out to the mailbox because I belong to the last generation to feel that dutiful pull. Well, better check the mail, might be a postcard. Hasn’t been a postcard since 2004, but you never know.

I have no animus toward the junk-mailers. Email junk, on the other hand, makes me irrationally mad. Every day, in unceasing torrents, come the offers of handbags from Chinese factories.

Hello to Good sir, how are? We are selling high quality; bags and purses, to kindly request, may we offer of them. Sincere, Kyle. I cannot stop them. I cannot write an email rule that will keep them from popping up in my phone notifications. At least I can wave off the postman by standing on the porch with a shotgun: Keep movin’ along now. Thaaaat’s right. But Kyle and Bob and Carol and the rest claw at my attention like zombies piling up outside the window, hands scrabbling on the glass.

Ten times every day I see an email from a company I do not recognize and scroll to the bottom. This email is from a mailing list, says the type displayed in the size of ant whiskers. Click here to unsubscribe. This I do, whereupon I have several options:

(1) Unsubscribe from hourly deals from catheter4U.com. (2) Only send me daily offers for the best tubes intended to be inserted up one’s urethra. (3) Send a weekly digest of offers (note: weekly digest sent daily). (4) No, I don’t want to save money on the best and most comfortable silicon-greased urinary-tract straws.

You click “no” and get a page that says it will take from four to six weeks to process your request. Odd, that. If I had opted into these emails, they would have appeared instantaneously, but apparently removing me from the mailing list is complicated. The removal request is printed out, put in an envelope, placed in a forked stick, and handed to a man who puts on his snowshoes and begins the arduous trek up the Swiss Alps, where it is delivered to a man who gets out a great bound volume of email addresses. He finds yours, erases it, and then puts the book in a wicker basket attached to a St. Bernard, who makes the trek down to the village, where an emissary of the company sends the corrections in the email list by semaphore lamp to the home office. (He has carpal -tunnel syndrome and cannot bang out more than six names a day.)

To your surprise, you’re still getting offers six to eight weeks later. Why? Because your attempt to unsubscribe just told them they had a real email.

A presidential candidate who vowed to stop junk email and spam calls would vault up 20 points in the polls. Imagine the 2024 debates. A moderator asks about all the petty, maddening intrusions on our digital life and what the candidate proposes to do to stop them.

Joe Biden, or rather his animatronic simulacrum operated by the president in his bedroom, using a special motion-sensing suit developed by Disney: “In my administration, we’ve been concerned about these things, and they’re gone down, repeat the line, over 30 percent, because the more computers, the computers all connected to things, with the wires, some say they cause cancer, dammit, and they contribute to our climate crisis. We’re dedicated to bringing down the price of gas so people can afford to drive to the dealership and buy an electric car. Which my administration has, since the beginning, done something about, today.”

Governor DeSantis: “As governor of Florida, I helped pass legislation in 2023 that cut off electricity to any company that did not unsubscribe you from an email list within 30 minutes of the request. As president, I will not only jail phone scammers, I will put them to work in chain gangs cleaning feces and needles from the streets, guarded by robot dogs that fire lasers from their eyes. By the way, given how scrambled the president’s answer was, why don’t you ask him how he screwed up the price of eggs as well?”

Forty-nine-state sweep.