Am I being paranoid or are the robots trying to catch me?
It all started at the beginning of the 21st century.
In the early days of email, we were delighted with its speed and reliability, far superior to “regular mail,” but there is always someone who has to screw things up for everyone else. In the case of email, they were the suppliers of the namesake of a certain pork-based substance. They became such a nuisance that large teams of robots had to be employed to keep them under control.
As pigs got smarter, robots had to get even smarter. At first, everyone agreed that strict measures must be taken to defeat the pigs. Have you ever heard the phrase “flush the baby with the bath water” or “the cure is worse than the disease”?
The number of spam merchants multiplied over and over again. Ultimately, the only way to control them was for each email user to have their own bot to filter their email. I didn’t want a robot to filter my mail, but I didn’t have many options: no one was allowed an email account without a robot to control its usage.
Every time I log into my email, I pause and listen to the slight metallic scraping and a slight pneumatic hiss as the robot wakes up and prepares to filter my mail. No matter how quiet he is, he always knows and is instantly awake and alert, ready to do his job. I didn’t ask for robotic help, I don’t want it, I don’t need it, but the robot is here to stay.
I think my robot is like the paranoid android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – slow and depressed, so I call him Marvin (not to his face, of course). I suppose my Marvin doesn’t feel that censoring my mail is a suitable occupation for a robot of his caliber, since his namesake thought attending the parking lot at the end of the universe was a great career for a robot with a brain. size of a planet. For my part, I am sure that I am old enough to take full responsibility for my own correspondence. There’s no need for Marvin to exhaust his circuits on my own, but it seems like we’re stuck with each other the entire time.
The extent of Marvin’s power first came to my attention when a regular newsletter that I enjoyed did not arrive. The delivery was completely stopped.
I asked my email provider if there was a problem with this particular email and they said there was no problem with my mailbox, that it must be a problem with the sender. I asked the sender why the delivery had stopped and they said no, it must be a problem with my mailbox. I gave up and re-subscribed to the newsletter. Every time delivery stopped after that, I wondered what else I could be missing in the way of interesting mail.
Shortly after this, I realized that Marvin has a bad attitude. Now I can sympathize with him because I know what it feels like to be stuck in a boring job while brain cells wither away. That doesn’t mean that you think you should misbehave, you should do the job to the best of your ability (even if you’re below it) and not get into mischief.
Everyone seems to believe that robots keep changing the rules in an effort to get ahead of pigs, but I don’t. I think they keep changing the rules mainly out of boredom, but in Marvin’s case, I feel a certain underlying malevolence. This came up recently when I emailed a friend I hadn’t heard from in a while. My mail was recovered with a message to the effect that the spam would not be sent. How dare they really Spam! From that day on, all the emails I tried to send bounced back.
Annoyed, I contacted the email company’s helpdesk to complain. They kindly told me that this issue had nothing to do with them, I must have used banned words in my emails and that’s why they bounced. Banned words included “friend”, “free”, “you”, “internet”, “delete”. The list of forbidden words is long and growing day by day, it is difficult to invent suitable sentences without using the forbidden words, soon our only way to send emails will be inventing a new language.
My problem now is that I cannot send emails to my friends and they cannot receive them to me. Too late I realized that we had forgotten to exchange phone numbers – it didn’t seem to make sense when email was so quick and easy. Now I can’t send emails, I can’t receive emails, the robot has isolated me.
There is only one way out of quarantine and it has been a long time since I sat down with paper and pencil to write letters. I will not use the word processor because I am convinced that Marvin will recognize it as a means of communication, but I do not think he knows what the pen is for and I doubt that he will be suspicious if I take some envelopes. next time I go out. A glorified email filter is unlikely to know the purpose of a mailbox other than the virtual variety.
I hear Marvin move even though I haven’t turned on my computer, he seems to have the ability to read my mind. There is a slight metallic sound, odor of ozone, an electrical crackling in the air. His hand on my shoulder is heavy and cold, the steel joints creaking as his fingers clench. I don’t think I’m going out to send letters.
