Mr. Mayberry's Melancholy
Every day at work I'm "blessed" with the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of people. This gaggle of shiftless layabouts (whose only real unifying trait is that they purchase internet service from the company for which I labor endlessly) is comprised of doctors, housefraus, lawyers, porn stars, gamers, journalists, and a whole host of very pathetic, very depressing, middle aged men with no one to reach out to, no vessel in which to pour their sorrowful litany.

Mr. Mayberry happened to be one of these men.

I started our conversation politely. You see Mr. Mayberry had unknowingly been issuing forth into my lovely polished tubes the drek of unsolicited email oft advertising creams with which to increase the length and breadth of your manhood or the ferocity of your disgusting organic spurtings. Mr. Mayberry was shocked! "How did this happen?!" he asked. "Well sir, you have a virus on your machine that comes with a set of instructions that tell it to send out email while it runs in the background so you're unaware of it's existence." was my reply. "But how did that happen?" he repeated, which is actually fairly standard when you're telling someone that the sanctity of their digital realm has been violated. Remembering that there has been a rash of e-card based virus payload spam going around recently I asked if he had recently gotten any e-cards and if so had he opened them.

Mr. Mayberry took a moment to reply. The pause itself felt loaded.

"Well...yeah...but, y'know..it was my birthday just a couple days ago and...y'know, I just thought maybe those were real"

I pictured him seating himself at his computer on his birthday, forcing bitter and jaded thoughts that no one cares from his head, to check his email. Oh the excitement! Oh the exquisite joy when he sees it, the e-card. Someone cares! No one forgot him on his birthday this year. Someone finally loves him and OHGODTHISISSOWONDERFULIMUSTCLICK!

The rush must have been heady.

Here we are now, several days later, and Mr. Mayberry has me on the phone informing him that not only did no one actually send him an e-card on his birthday, it was in fact all a ruse to utilize his resources. To catch him in the giant web o' spam that is so vast these days, adding dick-cream insult to birthday-fraud injury.

That's right sir, not only does no one care, but you are to the spammer as a whore to her pimp, one to be fucked and used as a resource, discarded just as easily as you were ensnared once your usefulness has waned.

I couldn't help but feel sorry for the man. What must his life be like when the thought that no one actually sent you an e-card, the most disingenuous of well wishing, could sadden him so deeply that a complete stranger (focused solely on completing his repetitive task) picks up on it. This hulking giant of sadness and solitude serves as a reminder, when I feel as if things are hopeless I can remember that I am not a man who is brought to his knees by a simple ruse banking on the emptiness of my life. I am the merciless crusher of dreams, the dispeller of illusions, and I am here to help.