writers-blog

So, I received quite a bit of spam today on a site that I work with. This was in no way surprising but the topic of my spam was. I mean, I expect someone to attempt to sell me Viagra using spam or to convince to increase my… size (how do they all know?! Who is telling everyone this?!) or anything that could be bought spontaneously or in a weak moment. Exactly for that reason I had not expected to be spammed into the ground by this guy selling… Grand Pianos. I know, you are thinking: how did that happen? How did someone decide to try and sell grand pianos using spam-mails? Well, it’s actually quite easy once you think about it.

I mean, imagine that you are waking up on a lazy Sunday morning and slowly you finish scratching yourself and tumble over to the computer. Now, it’s early in the month and you still have some disposable income and you are already considering how best to waste it – by no means excluding sordid options, by no means. You are open to any offer on pills, pumps and female shaped balloons and if someone told you about how you just won the special Bolivia Lottery for Former Llama Breeders, you would be ready to go nuts over that too. Instead, though, you are confronted with a series of staggering deals on Grand Pianos. So, rather than ending up with a suspicious but basically innocent bottle of blue pills that you will probably never use until you are at some poor souls bachelor party and use it to spike his drink, you end up with a three meter long, black grand piano that you somehow squeeze in between the back wall and the front door of your apartment just as you realise that you can’t even play the damn thing. Right about this time a bottle of Viagra is beginning to sound pretty good.

So, what on earth do you do? Your apartment is completely ruined by this majestic, black monster of a musical instrument that shouldn’t by all rights even have been able to get into your apartment in the first place. There really only is one thing to do – you have to sell the damn thing. So, then you start trying to get the spammer to take it back, but he is a spammer – no way. He probably lives somewhere in Africa or China where he mass-manufactures Grand Pianos in small sweatshops and then smuggles them all to the west using very obese humans for mules (it’s the only way known to successfully smuggle a grand piano). Then what? You try to contact friends and relatives on Facebook but no-one needs a grand piano or they are too embarrassed to admit that they do. Using Ebay only gets you banned from the site for selling that sort of illicit product.

So, what can you do? Only one answer: you set up a mail-server and you start spamming people with offers on Grand Pianos. With the awesome power of the spam-mail at your side, soon your piano is sold, but then it happens. Offers keep coming in on the damn piano even after it’s sold and it’s just too darn tempting. Before long you are trying desperately to import a batch of “genuine” Steinways from some guy who supposedly is named “Nick” and lives in Boston but still for some reason prefers to send his Grand Pianos from Porto Alegre using a small, fat Mexican named Pedro who has an uncanny amount of room up his backside.

For a moment everything is well and money is just pouring in but then Pedro gets caught burping up sequences of Mozart’s 21st piano concerto in C major right as he is passing through the toll at Amsterdam. Suddenly, you find yourself a wanted man and fleeing through Europe desperately dragging your last genuine Baldwin SD-10 Concert Grand Piano behind you in a thin rope hoping to sell it at a bar in Marseilles for a boat ticket to Buenos Aires. Much later, retired and living with your much younger wife – a once-beautiful and famous concert pianist who never could give up the habit and married her pusher – you tell small children on the small market square on Sundays how you were once a big-shot, a major player during the legendary days of illicit grand piano smuggling at the very beginning of the century. They, of course, don’t believe a word of what you say.

And really, who wants that?