...one would walk a mile to school in freezing temperatures in a city that had no sidewalks, just snowbanks, and wear no hat becasue hats mess up one's fabulous eighties hair. And we liked it!
posted by Henry Basenji at
8/14/2003 11:31:00 AM
Monday, August 04, 2003
E-mail Anthrax
So, Friday evening I booted up the ol' laptop to check and clear my e-mail.
I hadn't gone into work so I wanted to see if I missed anything particularly annoying, and since it was my birthday I wanted to see who remembered (props to Diana and Kevin Casey); mostly however by aim was to to weed out the spam...at least 80% of the mail I get is spam and if I don't clear it somewhat regularly it chokes my mail servers.
So I'm there, checking off messages to delete when I see a message from BurkeJWilmore@earthlink.net, with the subject field "
5.7 MB file! Please Distribute!"
Huh.
I haven't seen or spoken to Burke Wilmore in probably nine years. Maybe ten. I have never exchanged e-mail with him. I was not even aware of his e-mail address. Given the extremely spammy subject line, I thought, well, maybe this account was hijacked by a spammer. Perhaps it's just a coincidence. It could happen. I didn't open it, but I didn't delete it either. I continued my mail purge.
After I finished deleting and dealing with my real mail, I returned to this message. What if it wasn't a coincidence? I was curious. OK, I figured, I'll open it but I won't open the attachment. So I opened it. There was no written message...just the attachment. The attachment was named "sibley phone call.mov.zip".
Huh.
At least I could tell at this point that this e-mail was actually from someone I knew. The Sibley file name proved that. Could it be a prank? Maybe, I thought, someone signed up for a Burke account and is sending me a joke file. That's when I noticed I was not the only recipient listed for the e-mail. The other addressed listed were bigjfs-at-aol.com, Stanek's address from - what, five years ago? - and hskinner-at-maguirewoods.com, which if I'm not entirely mistaken belongs to Hal's dad. That's when I decided the e-mail was most likely actually from Burke. Poor pitiful Burke obviously has some funny Sibley joke, but is so out of touch he doesn't know any e-mail addresses to send it to. I have no idea how he came across my accurate account. I must have written it on a Christmas card I sent to Sibley one year.
So then I decide to try and open it, all the while full of trepidation of what horrors it might hold. (After all, I'm still shell-shocked from opening the e-mail from Cal Coolidge that revealed the birth of his child.) However, this was easier said than done. The huge file defied my attmpts to open or download. It refused to open on my laptop, and crashed my desktop three times. Finally I was able to download it on the laptop and transfer it over to the desktop to open. That took some time as well, since I had to guess at the file format since the program that tried to open it automatically didn't work. But open it I finally did.
My reaction was initially "heh" followed by annoyance. It is a mildly humorous video at the expense of everyone's favorite target Sibley, but it just went on and on in the same vein, and there was no payoff. (I guess that's why Burke works in the theater and not film.) So after all that, all I get is a snicker. What a let-down.
I was initially going to post a link to the file here, but I've decided not to unless for some reason there is a cranky clamor. Why not? Well, to recap: Someone I have not heard from in ten years, who has made zero effort to be in any sort of remote contact with me during that entire time, out of the blue e-mails me a giant, annoying, multiple system crashing file with absolutely no explanation, context or even polite greeting with the command "
Please distribute!"
My answer: fuck you.
