Hacked

For the last three-ish years I've been meaning to get rid of my old Hotmail account.

It's a bit embarrassing to work in technology and be associated with a so-far-out-of-fashion-it-might-as-well-come-with-spats email provider. Not that Hotmail marks you as a person of the Geezer persuasion like an AOL account does ::cough,CG1,cough::

Like a lot of people, I have two accounts - one for online purchases, newsletters, and other Spam-generating endeavours and one for legitimate correspondence - the legit account is a Gmail account.

The Hotmail account, at last check, included a reminder from Clarins that I'm not getting any younger and need to order moisturizer, coupons from Petco, tips on preparing the perfect Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving meal from Epicurious and a dozen offers from Nigerian princes wishing dearly to enter into highly profitable enterprises with a greatly-respected businessperson such as yours truly.

So for 36 months I've been contemplating moving my email, updating all my online shopping accounts, editing the profiles of all the networking sites I subscribe to, redirecting newsletters, et cetera ad nauseam.

And every time I think about it, my eyes lose focus, my ears begin to ring and I have to lie down.

Until this past Halloween.

On Halloween a very helpful miscreant in the UK (not Birmingham) hacked my Facebook account. While there, s/he changed my status to indicate that I am married to a woman named Jawan Olive (who is lovely, but unavailable), I was born in 1906, I am on Facebook looking for romance with men and women (you can imagine the porn Spam that sparked) and posted a new personal credo in the Quotations field that read something like this:

Something Something the N-Word
Something Something Jews
Something Something Something
I hate all of you.

While Hacker was in Facebook he lifted my Hotmail address which, stupid me, used the same password.

And a blizzard of Nigerian business offers ensued. Viagra and Estonian brides can't be far behind.

But this is a good thing - email-wise. I now have two Gmail accounts, I've moved over the Important Junk Mail - like the moisturizer reminder and the dog food coupons - and I'm letting all the crap I really didn't want to look at anymore, but was too lazy to unsubscribe from, collect at Hotmail.

So, thank you, Hacker. If you'll forward your email address to me, I'll send you a nice virus for Christmas.