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I have always loved mail, so much so that I often think I’d have made a good postal carrier. I could have one of those big leather pouches, a vehicle with the steering on the wrong side, and a day off on every holiday.

Postal workers are unappreciated and unfairly criticized, but after decades of working for the newspaper, I’ve long been accustomed to that.

However, postal workers have quite a grind. Years ago, I spent a day with a postal carrier, Mr. Metcalf, and I learned quickly that there’s far more to it than a leisurely walk through the neighborhoods each day. For every dime they earn, they deserve a quarter.

I get my own daily dose of mail wrangling each morning when I open my work email interface. Each morning there are a couple hundred unread messages, and I spend more time than I should going through them to decide which two or three I actually need to see.

Most are junk. Some are spam. A few are merchandising from places I’ve done business. I always open Col. Littleton’s Leather Emporium messages in case some expensive bison bag I covet has been marked down 80%. (It hasn’t yet, and I’m not holding my breath).

I get a daily digest from an outfit called 1440, a digest from the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, a short reading from Daily Stoic, and another called Delanceyplace.com. Among my favorites is Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in building their vocabulary.

And then there are the pitches, which I’ve always known as over-the-transom pieces, although nobody calls them that anymore, or even remembers transoms. Those get about three seconds before they head off to the Microsoft trash bin.

The emails that I find the most interesting are the hoaxes; they keep me abreast of the latest trends in scammery.

I know my Paypal account has not been frozen. Nobody’s done anything with my Amazon account, Netflix, or any of a half-dozen other accounts I don’t even have.

But one I got the other day broke new ground for me. I got an email from some guy named Jason, who said he had taken over my computer and made a video of me doing something embarrassing while looking at nekkid women on the internet.

It was clear by the way he wrote that it was unlikely that he was a native English speaker. There was something about the syntax that didn’t ring true, even when he referred to me as “mate” and used other idioms with the hope of sounding British or Australian. The tone of his prose bounced from profane to formal and back, and he eventually got to the point: Send him 1,014 Bitcoin or he’d send the video to everyone in my contact list.

I did a quick calculation based on the day’s valuation of Bitcoin: $22,853,227.80, up a million or so from the day before. Like I’ve just got that lying around.

But the joke’s on him; had he really “taken over my computer,” he’d know my webcam is covered by a Chiquita banana sticker.

Bill Perkins is editorial page editor of the Dothan Eagle and can be reached at bperkins@dothaneagle.com or 334-712-7901. Support the work of Eagle journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today at dothaneagle.com.

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