This Week In The Dream Antilles

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Friday Dawn, Bahia Soliman, Mexico

Your Bloguero was awakened shortly before dawn this morning by the persistent dinging of his Blackberry.  About 24 dings in rapid succession indicating the receipt of emails.  Your Bloguero imagined that he had somehow, despite his best efforts to the contrary, achieved minor celebrity status.  He was not sure how that could be, or what he could have done, but what else could have him receive 24 emails one after the other?  Today, after all, is Friday.  Friday is auspicious, your Bloguero thought.  It’s a great day to open the floodgates of fame and adulation.  Why not?  No such luck.  Opening one eye, your Bloguero discovered to his annoyance that the 24 messages were emails from his automated friends at Yahoo telling your Bloguero that he had sent email to a bad address, and that the email had been rejected by the recipient’s ISP.  Your Bloguero opened his other eye.  There was obviously a problem.  Your Bloguero had not sent any emails to anybody on that account.  So, your Bloguero’s razor sharp wit figured, somebody else had sent them.  How very disappointing.  It wasn’t fame that was dinging so insistently. It wasn’t adulation, praise, recognition.  It wasn’t anything good. No. It was hackage. Plain and simple.

And who, your Bloguero wondered, might have decided to hack this account?  This was the account associated with your Bloguero’s postings on various group blogs.  Had your Bloguero so enraged someone with something he had recently written that he provoked such a hack?  Your Bloguero could only hope.  Was this pay back of some kind?  Your Bloguero should be so lucky.  Who would have done that?  What followed were the kind of pre-coffee conspiracy theories reserved for such abrupt, early wakings.  In two words, incipient paranoia.  But alas.  Even this was too puffed up, too egocentric, too self important.  Your Bloguero wasn’t being treated to well deserved, well earned attack.  No.  Nothing that good.  Nothing that heroic. The email had a link in it.  It was commercial spam from Romania for erection enhancement.  If you will pardon the pun, how very deflating.  How contracting.  What a lame way to start Friday: changing the password so it won’t happen again.

The next thing will doubtless be responding to the numerous emails – your Bloguero received one while writing this — telling him he has been hacked.   And telling the recipients, that yes, your Bloguero knows and he’s changed his password and he regrets any inconvenience.

How disappointing.  From web hero to complete sucker in a nanosecond.

This Week In The Dream Antilles is usually a weekly digest. Sometimes, like now, it isn’t actually a digest of essays posted in the past week at The Dream Antilles.  For that you have to visit The Dream Antilles.