I open the dashboard of the blog. A pending comment! How exciting–I love hearing what people have to say. It is, after all, one of the two reasons why I post. What is one of my dear readers going to say? Is he or she going to vehemently disagree with one of my opinions, citing an early twentieth century physicist? Will he or she show me the error of my ways (or just gently highlight the lack of maturity of thought (which is fascinating in it of itself; I am going to write about the “levels of sophistication” someday)?

Perhaps the commenter will disagree but will fail (deliberately or not) to provide justification. A dramatic exchange of epithets will ensue, culminating in a climactic revelation that the commenter actually agrees with me but wanted to truly understand the reasons behind my statement.

Perhaps it’s just a friend of mine who lazily dropped a line just to create a semblance of keeping in touch.

I am not picky… maybe it’s some teenager who really needs to express his hatred toward something and a couple of paragraphs online seem like an easy target? I would be pleased with that as well. After all, a comment is a comment. There are no stupid comments (just a lot of angry idiots).

I open the page to see what one of the above has to say. The first half of the sentence is intriguing, thought-provoking. It’s open-ended — I can visualize hundreds of ways to follow the first half. It’s catchy. It says,

At first it wasn’t clear to me what you were trying to say,

I can hardly stop myself from reading the rest of the comment. Will it reveal the ultimate truth about the Universe? Will it point out the fundamental flaw in me? I should calm down, drink some tea, perhaps sleep over it. The comment won’t disappear. It will still be here in the morning.

I couldn’t sleep. I had this dreadful dream in which I was captured by a secret society (the Freemasons?) who demanded to know the secrets of the Universe. These secrets, apparently, were hidden in the second half of that comment and only I could unlock that comment! Perceiving that the stakes were high, I was silent. I was getting ready to endure unimaginable pain while being subjected to mediæval torture when I woke up. I must read the second half of that comment!

And there it was:

At first it wasn’t clear to me what you were trying to say, but then I re-read your post and everything became clear. Thank you, this is now one of my favorite sites!

Strangely flattering, wouldn’t you say? Why the sudden change of heart? It was a post about puppies, for goodness sake, does one really need to read it twice to understand it? And is it really the reason to make this one’s favorite blog? Who am I dealing with here? Is this some kind of a test?

I did more investigation. The author of the comment lived abroad (I could tell from a .ru email address, oh how proud I was of my investigative work). How exciting! Perhaps a language barrier is why the comment didn’t immediately make sense to me. Perhaps I should ask one of my Russian friends (Do I have any?) to help me understand this bit of prose. Some idiom in his or her native tongue that the commenter unknowingly translated literally?

I picked up the phone and called my Token Russian Friend. He greeted me with a grunt–it was 4 a.m. (since I woke up in the middle of the night). When I explained the gravity of the situation to him (It’s a matter of life and death, after all. And my sanity. And possibly a $50 gabazillion treasure locked inside these few words), he asked me to read the comment to him (strangely, unlike me and surely everyone else in the world, he did not sleep curled up with his laptop).

“You’re an idiot. This is spam.”

Toot toot, caller disconnected, announced my iPhone with a snazzy transition that cost several million processing cycles to generate.

Imagine how heartbroken I was. Crestfallen. I felt cheated. Why, of why, would such a tragedy happen to me? What have I done to deserve this?

Sadness turned to confusion, then to grief, finally to anger (Somebody’s to blame for this! This damned society is to blame. This consumer culture. Death to capitalism!).

Then despair.

Finally, I went back to sleep having figured out how I will exact vengeance. I will blow the whistle! I will post about the dirty ways in which those spamists operate. I will let the world know! I will share my painful experience with everyone else, as a warning for others. And if the least I can do is save one poor soul from losing a good night’s sleep, then so be it!

P.S. http://spamradio.com/ is now one of my favorite sites (although at first it wasn’t clear to me what the authors were trying to say…)