Today, as usual, I spent some time at Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse. Two of the customers, a husband and wife, were there from nearly the time I arrived at 11:30 to when I left at 15:00 and were spent nearly their entire time on the public access terminals.

Now normally I try to keep out of people's business, but a few minutes after I arrive, their monitor turns red. Rather than take Micah from behind the counter, I help them screw the VGA cable back into the video card to get all their colors back. And with that swift action, I become the Computer Expert.

"Do you know a lot about computers?" she asks me, as I begin to walk away.

"I try to avoid it," is my deadpan reply. Her husband guffaws. She plows on.

"My friend has a Macintosh laptop that's giving her problems. Is there any way to fix it?"

Fuck it, now I'll look rude. "What sort of problems?"

"Well, she can only get it to work when she has the screen like this," she says as she holds her hands at a 60 degree acute angle, "otherwise it's all black."

"How old is it?" I ask.

"It's a Macintosh," her husband replies from in front of the computer.

"It's a Macintosh," she repeats.

"How old is it?" I ask again.

"Oh, it's real old. Right?" Husband nods. "Real old."

"Yeah, it's probably not worth it, because it'll cost you more to fix something like that than to buy a new one," I reply. Or me, five minutes, twenty bucks and a phillips head screwdriver, I think to myself, but I don't really like you that much.

"Oh is that because Macintoshes are going out of style?"

"No, it's not." I hold my tongue. She thanks me and I return to my coffee.

An hour or two later, I sit over by the public terminals to get some fresh air by the front door and read my e-mail. She sees my Powerbook G4 as she walks by and acts embarassed. "Oh you... ha." Complete sentence.

I can't help but overhear fragments of her conversation with her husband. "All they want to collect the insurance money is our name, phone number, and address, what address should I give them, ours on Keswick or the one in New York."

I have a sneaking suspicion what this is. But I'm torn. I know if I try to tell her about the Nigerian 419 scams, it's gonna get weird. I'm not really even certain that's what she's doing. I look at the husband's screen. He's filling out a colorful web form to enter a sweepstakes for a free laptop.

I give in. I can't help it. "I don't mean to be rude," I interject, "but I couldn't help but overhearing what you are talking about. Do you know the person who is sending you the money?"

"Oh yes," she replies, "you see, my husband looks black, but he's not really." I snort. "You see, he's Portugese and he has relatives with insurance money that they are trying to give him. This Nigerian fellow is trying to help us claim it. But for some reason, they always e-mail me, so I have to reply to them."

The husband nods sagely. "Yeah, we know them."

"Okay," I reply. I have no idea what to reply to this, so I just say, "I just didn't want you to be giving out your bank account number or something to somebody you don't know."

"Oh that's not going to happen, you see I have a bank account in Upstate New York, but," she looks at me as if imparting a deep secret, "I can't remember what it is." She laughs, and I smile, nod and go back to my table.

The snippets of her questions to her husband continue. "Should I open this one from Barrister Smith?" "Can I reply to this one from this other Nigerian fellow?" I realize that both husband and wife are systematically going through their Hotmail boxes and either replying to or filling out the web forms from every appealing spam message they have received that is offering "something for nothing."

I'm astonished, but I have no idea what to do. Do I drop a note with the Snopes URL on it? Everything I surf on the web about 419 scams seems too complicated to present to these people without dedicating the next 45 minutes of my life to explaining what they say, then and making the woman possibly very embarrassed and possibly hoping that I will help her undo all the damage she has already done to herself.

In the end I do nothing, and the wife switches to playing flash card games while the husband tries to win his free iPod by filling out a web form. I have finally met the people who reply to spam, and I am in awe.

#5538

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