Saturday, August 11, 2007

Meet Ann Smith...Part 1

The image used in this post is a jpg of French mathematician, Blaise Pascal. I'm sure most of you are asking yourselves why an image of Pascal would be featured in a pieced called "Meet Ann Smith".It seems that, although Pascal has been dead since 1662, he has, of late been involved in a series of email exchanges with a Ms. Ann Smith.
Ann is an 18 year old Nigerian girl and like all 18 year old Nigerian girls, she is an orphan and heir to an incredible amount of money.Of course, she needs Blaise Pascal's help in transferring the money out of Nigeria where she can claim it in full.
Let me start at the beginning.
A few years ago, my primary email account was with Netscape. Now, however, that email address is useless due to the ever increasing number of emails from spammers and scammers. To make matters worse, it is difficult to access the Netscape email account using the Firefox browser. I only use it now as a source of scammers to fool around with.
When I was using that email on a regular basis , I put in a signature into my preferences using a quotation from Pascal. At the end of each message there read:

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
Blaise Pascal
French mathematician, physicist (1623 - 1662)

A few days back, I received an email from Ann Smith with the usual Nigerian orphan story. My usual response from any scam email I find interesting is to explain that I need a photo so that I can be certain that the person is who they claim to be.
Of course, I know the person isn't giving a true name and I know any photo I receive will not be a true photo.....but it makes for better blogging if I have an image. I had forgotten about the email to Ann and I was taken by surprise when she sent me two replies.One email contained a photo and another sent afterwards was asking me why I had not answered her email with the photo.
The really odd thing was that "Ann" had taken my signature as part of the message and she believed my name was Blaise Pascal. ( I'm not sure what she thinks the 1623 - 1662 means )
I did not want to lose this fish but wasn't quite sure where I was going to take this. So, I sent off an email to Ann telling her that I had been ill and would send another email to her when I had fully recovered.
I gave this some thought while at work and decided to bring in Lucy Ricardo as Pascal's assistant.Returning from work tonight, Lucy sent an email to Ann telling her of Pascal's turn for the worse.Lucy, being the loyal assistant, would help Ann in any way possible.
So, this is where the story stands. I will put up Ann's photo in my next posting along with any response she gives to Lucy.
Until then......to be continued.

3 comments:

Dom Cimafranca said...

And her middle name wouldn't be "Nicole," would it? ;-)

Robert Simms said...

Hi Dom,
When you see "Ann's" photo you'll know she's no relation to Anna.

Olga said...

hi robert,

hilarious! you must have had great fun thinking up of the next story to feed to these scoundrels!

warmest regards to Cathy and JP