Jim is on the phone with Ira "Thou Shalt Not Stereotype" Glassman, who is for some reason still taking Jim's calls despite the fact that his life has been threatened numerous times as a result of Jim's insubordination, and oh yes, he has already fired his insubordinate employee. Jim is explaining, "I've just sent you an email and I'd like you to do an agency-wide distribution." Agent Shylock reads from his own computer monitor: "My name is Jim Prufrock. I have reason to believe that my life is in danger. On December 17th I received a fax " Montage-a-palooza. Jim sits back in his leather chair (I sure hope he doesn't have any dairy present, or this could be a nightmare scenario) and leans way far back (because it's next year in Jerusalem, but on this night, unlike all other nights, we recline), informing Jim, "This is paranoid stuff," adding, "Not only am I not going to send it, I'm going to delete it from my inbox and forget we ever had this little conversation." Jim starts to defend the sheer insanity of the correspondence we're mysteriously not allowed to read, and Ira gets through the clause, "If the average American read this " What Jim never finds out is that the rest of Ira's sentence was going to be, " they'd promptly have you arrested for combing the internet, harvesting a random collection of email addresses, and sending unsolicited bulk email to those recipients." But Jim hangs up on Agent Shylock, and no sooner does he do so than a cartoonish light bulb goes on with a "ding" over his continuing "Keepin' The Faith" coif. He goes back to his computer and brings up a page called "Net Search" that doesn't exist (I Googled it, of all the time-space-continuum-challenging logic), types in what I think is "Students, West Coast Universities," and scans down a page with dozens of hundreds of email addresses. He searches again: "East Coast Professional Association." Again on "Cable Subscribers." And one more on "Djb's Already-Crashing Television Without Pity Email Address." He pastes them all into the same "TO" box and adds the subject line "The Mystery of Push, Nevada." He clicks "send." It sends. He takes a momentary pause just long enough for 10,000 responses unambiguously reading "unsubscribe" to hit his inbox. The end.













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