A Missing Jesus, Junk Mail & a Poor Russian

Admittedly, I have issues.  I will not pretend that it isn’t so.  Maybe it is my OCD or my occasional dyslexia but there are a few things in life that drives me absolutely nuts.  And no, not the kind of nuts where I am only mildly irritated. It drives me the kind of nuts where I want to take a baseball bat and pretend another human’s head is a piñata while humming the theme song from psycho.  I know it’s not normal to get this angry about junk mail, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and 419 scam or phising emails, but I do.  I can’t help it.  So this past weekend I decided to take a look at the intolerable cruelties I am troubled with, see if my anger was justified and whether there actually is something I can do about it.

Sunday mornings in my neighborhood seems to be the one day of the week when Jesus seems to be missing.  Every other Sunday morning our doorbell rings.  On the other side of the intercom I can usually see two people dressed in their Sunday’s best clothes asking if we have found Jesus.  “What is he missing?” doesn’t always yield the result one would expect and ninety present of the time it only seems to aggravate them.  I have found that there is nothing worse than an aggravated and determined Christian and “Can we come in and talk to you about Christ?” is then also always my cue to hang up.  Sometimes they will press the bell for up to ten minutes, sometimes they get the message and leave.

We live in South Africa and I don’t know any people who would allow total strangers, no matter how Christian like they look, into their homes.  It’s fucking dangerous!  Besides, I don’t allow any person into our property without them being vetted or, at the very least, having done a quick background check on them.  We live in a dangerous world and I have not upgraded our house’s security to that of a fortress only to let two roaming recruiters for Christ come into my house only to rob and molest me.  Call me paranoid but at least my paranoia have kept me alive for this long.  But a missing Jesus is but only one of my bothers.  There is also the junk mail.

There is a reason hubby and I get our mail delivered to a PO Box address.  Just the other day I demonstrated one of the reasons by accidentally opening up my neighbor’s bank statements.  It was lying on the floor in front of our front door.  Without thinking I picked it up, opened it and then with a shock realized it wasn’t ours.  Naturally, I found myself to be in a conundrum:  Do I try and glue it close again and drop in over their wall or do I shred it and pretend I never saw it.  I choose the latter.

Since we moved into our house we haven’t had a mailbox.  We had no need for one seeing as we have a post box, but this didn’t stop the junk mail distributers.  Every day for the last two years we had junk mail stuck in our aloe, glued to our front door, garage door and/or wall.  So in an effort to stop these suburban terrorist from defacing our property’s façade, hubby and I bought a mailbox and spray painted it a bright red and secured it prominently to our front wall.  You would have to be blind not to see it.  This, I thought, would solve all our junk mail problems.  I could not have been more wrong.

Our fabulous mailbox have been on our wall for less than 48 hours and already we have had junk mail taped to it, stuffed underneath our door and glued to our wall.  The fuckers seem to be making a conscious effort to stuff and stick their junk shit everywhere except in our fucking mailbox.  I swear they do this on purpose to drive me crazy, and it is working!

Junk mail and its aversion to mailboxes is one thing, but when I open my email and find that I have won the UK lottery for the infinite time, some princess needs help getting her fortune, my unexpected inheritance from a relative I didn’t know I had, the poor Russian who is stuck on the international space station because they can’t afford to bring him back or the unexpected deposit into my account at a bank I don’t even bank with, I want to scream.

We all know these emails are scams.  We all know to delete them and not open up the links that are contained in them.  We all know this, but yet everyday people all over the world fall for them and lately it feels like every 419 scammer got hold of my email address.  I have replied to a couple of them mostly using really fowl language that would make my mom blush, but when I heard of the poor Russian stuck on the international space station I was particularly amused, so I wrote them back.

In my response email I expressed my concern for the Russian, who had been on the space station for well over a year, and my concerns over his mental and physical health.  I offered to send him a care package whenever they launched another supply rocket up there.  I even suggested some possible ways to get him back which included stealing a spacesuit, thermal parachute, oxygen tanks and a fishing boat.  It wasn’t even a day before the Russian’s benefactor mailed me back saying that they need to raise $13 million to secure his save return, so I offered to give them $13.13 and some Farmville cash.  Needless to say they never mailed me back.

As for the people looking for Jesus, I have found a relatively easy solution.  Seeing as they pitch up only every other Sunday, I now switch off our intercom on those days.  They can ring the bell all they want and we are none the wiser.  The junk mail and the scam emails seem to be problems that will persist.  I have thought of beating the crap out of one of those guys who clearly don’t know what mailboxes are for but I can’t afford to get a criminal record for aggravated assault and/or attempted murder.

As for the 419 scams, I must give it to them some of their emails are quite creative and fantastical and you have to be an idiot to fall for them.  But the world has many idiots, and as long as they are there I guess I will keep on getting these damn emails.

Till next time.