I haven’t really been blogging for months, but weird emails still find their way to my inbox.
Dear Private, Registration:
I work for [Annoying Business] and we have discovered that a company we hired to help promote our website have used a variety of techniques to secure links to our site. These links were placed purely for SEO purposes, with the intention of manipulating search rankings.
It appears that there may be links like this that have been placed on your site.
The presence of these links is harmful to our site’s good standing with search engines, and unfortunately, retaining them may also be potentially harmful to your own website’s reputation.
We would ask that you please remove any links on your site that link to [Annoying Business].
You clutter my site with annoying spam and now you want me to waste time cleaning it up so you look better?
hey jen
me too liberal, geeky, nerdy, scientific, perverted feminist atheist .and desperate to find a girl friend like that.if u r single and wanna mingle , ping me back.. or refer me any other girl.i havent read any of your posts nor i have time to read ur stuff.. unless ofcourse u wanna be my frnd..
“…unless ofcourse u wanna be my frnd…
“By rights she should be taken out and hung
For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.”
Name that tune.
That first message is similar to a lot of spam that I receive at my blog.
Something about the grammar and the phrasing in the second email strikes me as being written by someone from India, or at least South Asia. (I’m from that part of the world, so I’ve seen a lot of stupid letters/emails/comments that sound exactly like that.)
It should be one of the rules of the internet – no matter what you do, you are getting extremely weird comments.
That’s “Why Can’t the English…” from My Fair Lady, is it not?
Maybe you should put the (ahem) “liberal, geeky, nerdy, scientific, perverted feminist atheist” in touch with [Annoying Business], expressing the hope that they’ll be very happy together?
Good one Nick.
My coworkers are wondering why I was laughing.
As Crommunist says, it’s “Why Can’t the English?” from My Fair Lady. Incidentally, there’s a bit of bad grammar in that couplet. Pictures are hung, people are hanged.
“Some people would complain if you hanged them with a golden rope.” -Anon
Morons. Internet haz them. In spades. (By the gross, too.)
Rodney, thank you so much! You are the first person in a long time that I have seen to use the correct word ‘hanged’, although I would add that is is only used if a person was killed by hanging, and not as a past tense for when a person ‘hung’ on for dear life, for example.
As for ‘strange’ e-mails, why do I never hear back from Nigerian generals once I’ve told them the account number they’re to send the money to?
“The French don’t care what they do, actually, as long as they pronounce it properly.”
I was gonna say somethin’ snarky about this bit. Somethin’ like:
‘Well, see, actually, a reasonable, working familiarity with my writings is in fact a minimal requirement for any kind of relationship. Romantic or otherwise. That’s just the rule. There’s even a quiz..’
… and then I got to thinking that, actually, enforcing such a rule could have saved me some real trouble over the years.
… So if anyone needs me, I’m putting the quiz together.
(/Oh, no, I’m not going to be completely unreasonable about this… I’ll do an introductory reader, too.)
I love the veiled swipe the company makes while glossing over their own spam so completely.
Seems like a reasonable complaint to me…
I also like how he stuck in ‘perverted’ directly before ‘feminist’ because, you know, all feminist women seek perverts.
I’m not a blogger and still get e-mails, and even occasional texts, like the first message. But that second one is just bizarre, even aside from the language which is the most forgivable part of the message.
“I don’t have time to listen to anything you say, so know nothing about you, but yeah, we should hook up.”
Still, my wife’s sister got a Facebook comment like that and was married to the dude 5 months later, engaged in just 2 weeks, because they shared the same religion. So it seems to be a decent pick-up line in some circles.
Reading the second e-mail reminds me of one of my English teachers sarcastically addressing a rather hopeless student with the immortal line – “and where did you learn to spoke proper England?”
@serena: That person simply copied and pasted Jen’s own description of herself in the sidebar to the right.
I have a couple apps on the Google Play store, and constantly get emails like the first.
As for the second… I really hope English is not their first language, or they are 5.
Actually that second email reminds me of the kind of ‘personal message’ I get lots of on dating websites, mixed with the templated spam I get at work (they hit your site for keywords, then send a message saying “I’m interested in …, please send your bank details” usually in the same poor English)