Does this sound familiar?
“First, I must solicit your strictest confidence in this transaction. This is by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and ‘top secret’….”
(sigh) Yet another “Nigerian” / “419” e-mail. I’ve lost count of how many of these things I’ve received over the past year. The first few lines always make me laugh. Partly it’s because of the “keep it Secret and Confidential” business — do they really believe that millions and millions of people don’t know about the scam already, or that they’re going to be able to keep knowledge of it from spreading if I keep the secret? But partly it’s the names of the people they purport to come from. Yesterday I got one that was supposed to come from Winnie Mandela. Yeah, I believe Winnie’s dying to send me millions of dollars… But the best one so far has been “from” Mrs. Helen Bongo and her son, Prince Dave Bongo. — This is doubtless that “more relaxed style” of modern royalty that we keep hearing about…
Yet it’s also true that these people take lots of money off the unwary every year. I wish I had the patience to do what this guy and this lady seem to have done. Two small pins in the butt for a representative couple of all those naughty people who’ve stolen so much from others….
Meanwhile, not only do I have someone else’s archives where mine should be, I now have two someone elses’ archives there….the new ones rather more personal than the old. “Tech — !!!” The heck with it, I’ll just turn them off again and see if that helps. (mutter, mutter)
But never mind. The author’s copies of A Wizard Alone have arrived. I now declare this book officially Real. It should be in the stores in a couple of weeks, if things go the way they usually do. Boy, I love these Cliff Nielsen covers (here’s what the new one looks like…).
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