Oh, nos! After gaining sentience and firing me in 2023, Wriphe.com has finally gotten around to deleting all my emails:

Hmm. An urgent, high pressure demand that I take action to save all my emails before they are all deleted forever? It's clearly marked © wriphe.com 2025, so it must be legit. I'd better click that button twice!

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Oh, my, God, I thought to myself, it's time for a new post at Wriphe.com. But what to post about?

Just as I was having that mental conversation, my email inbox pinged. As if in answer to my unspoken prayers, I received an email that reads

Hi again,

I'm still very interested in writing a guest article for your website on how property managers can boost renter satisfaction. I believe it would be a great fit for your audience.

If you're interested in receiving an article from me, please don't hesitate to let me know. I'll be more than happy to provide you with a high-quality piece.

Many thanks for your time today!

Wow! I wouldn't have thought that my audience would be interested in such things, but who am I to second guess an angel?

I have already slaughtered a fatted calf in appreciative offering, and I thank you in advance, Great Spirit of the Internet, for whatever quality piece you see fit to send my way next.

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I have received the worst news via email:

Received: Thu, 16 Feb 2023 06:53:46 -0800 (PST)
Subject: YOUR EMPLOYMENT STATUS FOR REDUNDANT LEAVE
From: Hr-Manager wriphe.com
To: mail wriphe.com
cc: ceo wriphe.com

Dear mail,
Employee at wriphe.com Company,

We are deeply saddened to inform you that your term of employment at wriphe.com company has come to an immediate end. Due to the affect of high tax tariff which have affected our finance negatively during the last audit, we have no choice but to end your employment with us because we cannot service all the employees anymore. This decision is effective immediately and the original documents for the cancellation of your employment will be given to you in three days time. Note this is not a sack letter to you, rather we are reducing the number of employees. This is just a redundant leave.

Find attached your 2 months salary receipt.

We thank you for your service and we wish it didn't have to end this way.

Sincerely,
Human Resources Manager

This letter can mean only one thing: after two decades, Wriphe.com has finally become sentient and terminated my employment given me redundant leave.

Don't cry for me. It's been a pretty good run here, and I'd like to thank you all for your support. I have my fingers crossed that I can land on my feet at another small, personalized website blog. I wonder if WalterStephens.com is hiring?

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I admit, when I first received this text, my first thought was, "So this is how he knows voter fraud is so widespread."

Further inspection seems to indicate that this has nothing to do with any political party but is actually a phishing scam.

Although, in this day and age, there still might be a political party behind it. Who knows anymore?

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"Lets get directly to point," started the email.

"Let me tell you, I setup a malware on the X videos (sexually graphic) web-site and you know what, you visited this site to experience fun (you know what I mean). When you were viewing video clips, your internet browser initiated operating as a Remote Desktop with a key logger which gave me accessibility to your display screen and also web camera. Immediately after that, my software program gathered your entire contacts from your Messenger, Facebook, and emailaccount. After that I made a video. 1st part displays the video you were watching (you have a good taste lmao), and second part displays the recording of your web cam, and its u."

X Videos sure is a "sexually graphic" website. And I am me. So that checks out. Now that it has my attention — sexually graphic videos will do that — the email continues by giving me some choices:

"First choice is to just ignore this e mail. As a result, I will send your actual video clip to each of your your personal contacts and also just consider concerning the shame you experience. Or in case you are in a romantic relationship, exactly how it will certainly affect?"

Romantic relationship? Shame? Got me there. Yes, my hand is going to be extremely upset to see itself spread across the web. How insidious!

"Next choice should be to pay me $7000. We will refer to it as a donation. As a result, I will quickly erase your video. You could go on daily life like this never occurred and you never will hear back again from me."

Actually, I'm kind of flattered that anyone would think I was worth extorting for seven thousand dollars. I'm not flattered enough to pay it, but flattered nonetheless.

"Should you are planning on going to the authorities, look, this email cannot be traced back to me. I have covered my moves. I am also not looking to charge you a huge amount, I simply prefer to be compensated. You have one day in order to pay. I have a specific pixel in this email message, and at this moment I know that you have read this email message."

"Specific pixels" are probably unnecessary when I'm posting the whole email on my blog, but I have to admire the thorough approach. Any extortion worth doing is worth doing right.

"If I don't receive the BitCoins, I will, no doubt send your video recording to all of your contacts including family members, co-workers, etc. Nonetheless, if I receive the payment, I'll erase the recording immediately. It is a nonnegotiable offer, therefore please don't waste my time & yours by responding to this mail. If you really want proof, reply Yea! then I will send your video recording to your 15 friends."

If you're one of my fifteen friends, considered yourself forewarned. You could find a video in your inbox of me "experiencing fun." Enjoy! Consider it a gift from everyone's best friend, Mr. Internet Spam.

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I was traveling through space with a little blue alien in pigtails when I was awakened by a telephone call telling me I had won a free cruise. A few hundred years ago, I could claim to be a prophet. In 2016, someone would have to be an idiot to believe that either scenario, interstellar spaceflight or free ocean voyage, was real.

Even though I grew up in the pre-cellular age, I've never been a big fan of telephone conversations. Back in my day, landline connections (which we just called "phones") delivered vastly superior audio quality (or perhaps my young ears just heard better), but even then each conversation was made of awkward pauses as each party guessed when the other was done speaking. About the only time I've ever enjoyed being on the phone for longer than 15 minutes was while engaging in phone sex in high school. Like real sex, the thrill wore off about the same time as my tongue got tired.

Now that my telephone has morphed into a personal assistant that I have nearby 24-hours a day, the telephone part of it has become less appealing than ever. I rarely feel the need to call anyone, and the only calls I get anymore are scams, like the aforementioned cruise I "won." (I only have to pay a "nominal" fee of a few hundred dollars to claim my prize: a ticket for a cruise with a face value of a few hundred dollars.) In college, I took my phone off the hook if I wanted to have sex. Now I turn my phone off just so I can sleep through the spam.

I'm beginning to think that the solution to spam telephone calls is to start charging for long-distance again. Robocalls existed in the age of analog telephones, but they weren't abused like this until technology made long-distance charges obsolete. If you made these spammers pay to place their calls, they'd stop. How many grandmothers do you have to bilk out of $9,000 to pay for a thousand telephone calls an hour?

A change in long distance rates might send us back to the days of the Sprint "Friends and Family" plans, where you got a discount on a limited number of numbers. That wouldn't bother me. I don't want to talk to anyone anyway. I gave up phone sex in the 20th century, and I haven't looked back.

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From time to time, I receive spam emails offering some modest compensation in exchange for posting an advertisement disguised as a blog post. Usually, this is to promote someone's brand of shoes or food or drugs. The latest one I received was particularly unusual.

My name is Mike, and my company (www.TrampolineParkDepot.com) has put together a really comprehensive site on how to start a trampoline park from A to Z.

I have an article idea that I think would appeal to your audience. It's about how to start your own super profitable trampoline business.

Is a "trampoline business" really a thing? Is reading about trampoline park construction the sort of thing any audience is into? Honestly, the older I get, the stranger this world becomes.

Anyway. You're welcome, Mike. I gave you that one for free.

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To celebrate Independence Day, I've turned the comments function back on. I've updated the form so that new posts require my approval until the system learns who you are. This should make it easier for those of you who like to comment frequently to avoid encountering that annoying captcha form. I'm doubtful that it will have any effect at all on the spambots.

If anyone finds a bug — there are certainly bugs — please let me know.

This change required rewriting the back-end code to make it more Web 2.1 compatible. Sadly, this will not make the site faster, as the slowness of the page to respond to requests is a side-effect of limited server memory. I'm considering migrating servers for a more consistently reliable response time. I'll spare no expense for my 12 readers!

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Right now, you cannot comment on any posts at Wriphe.com unless you send me an email through the contact form. Some site visitors have expressed displeasure over this change.

Because of spam, I cannot just let any comments go live without my approval. However, I am considering implementing a moderation queue that would hold posts from unapproved sources until I could review them for content. I could then conceivably give cookies to approved readers to let them bypass the annoying captcha fields.

Of course, there's no point in coding any of this if none of my 12 readers is interested in leaving me any comments. So if anyone reading would prefer that system to the current one (or if you have other ideas), email me via my contacts form and let me know.

Thank you for your consideration.

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Subject line on email received last week:

Lourdes S. Ploszaj wants you to EXPLORE her BOOBS

There is no way that "Lourdes S. Ploszaj" is a real person, but who doesn't want to explore some boobs?

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