I feel bad for people who call me (ever, but especially) while I’m at work. Absolutely nobody is listening– I have never met any of the people who currently work on my floor, and most of them probably think my cubicle is unoccupied– but I always get like the guys on “The Sopranos” trying to thwart the feds’ wiretap.

“Yes, it’s good to hear from you too, you there. How was our friend at that thing at the place? Yes, that is acceptable… and the same to your spouse or partner.”

What am I doing? What do I think they’re going to find out? “Did you hear? That disembodied voice, which I think belongs to either the bald man or the skinny Italian guy who’s sometimes in the break room, loves his wife and plans to go out to dinner.”

There was a time, I’m told, when people generally had offices. Work had doors.
Speaking of giving strangers the wrong idea: one of the quirks that come with owning your own domain name is the interesting effect it has on your spam. Specifically, you get about ten times as much of it as you normally would, because spammers who don’t know any e-mail addresses at jimski.net just start taking shots in the dark, and all of those shots hit you like Oswald’s magic bullets. After a long period of detente between my inbox and the spammers, some seedy ratf*** in the Valley seems to have discovered my domain and decided to give the vast Jimski empire a shot at his DIS C.O.UnT V 1 & GRA. How disappointed he would be to learn that, rather than getting his message across to the dozens of people with jimski.net e-mail addresses, he’s just getting it to me fifty times.

“DIS C.O.UnT V 1 & GRA.” I love the wild misspellings designed to thwart the spam filters, as if there exists an ideal customer who is simultaneously praying for a penis enlargement offer and doing everything in his power to keep from seeing it. “I will buy your gonad pills, sir, but only if your pitch escapes my fiendishly devised gauntlet! Your move, Mr. Bond!”

Spam isn’t really something that bothers me anymore. It’s like mosquitoes or traffic. What does trouble me is the other quirk of having your own domain name: sometimes, when spammers are putting fake addresses in their “From:” lines, they pick yours. Again, after a long period of quiet, suddenly this weekend I started once again to get “Delivery Failure” warnings from people I don’t know on messages I never sent. It’s probably been happening for five years, and it still wigs me out; I imagine myself in a windowless room explaining to my public defender, “But I never promised anyone at hotmail my horny housewives! I’m not even sure I know any!”