Your Grandmother was an Alien and the unassuming tree

Now what has a tree to do with me and my "IT world" - in reality nowt but I liked it so I took a picture of it whilst out walking the dogs today in several thousand acres of forest with not a person in sight.

But this tree is unassuming, it has no malice or mildly hidden agenda - trees just don't do this - not in their nature. For this to happen you need to throw some humans into the mix.

The "RE:" email....

So, mildly hidden agendas - the "RE:" email. Some unimaginative sales people have this strange idea that if they put a "RE:" in the subject line of an email to my companies that it will get read. But why would we read a supposed reply to an email that was never sent ? The email subject line gets a quick cursory glance before the index finger lands on the delete key. Now I'm sure that some of these emails may well have real genuine interest, a product or service of use but the sender's efforts are wasted on account of minimal effort and lack of imagination. Now, I'm no copywriter and I have made no real studies into human behaviour but if the person looking to sell to me had a subject line of "Your grandmother was an alien" then I'd open the email for the sender would have done some research and found that my sense of humoUr is a bit different. They would have made some effort.

Open this email quickly, everything is about to go horribly wrong

"Please visit the maintenance portal below to Automatically switch to the new (2019) mail settings to avoid service interruption within 12 Hours" well, of course I will because I'm absolutely certain that Microsoft use personal email accounts to send such emails. Hey, I'll even send you all my bank details and a copy of my passport....

Now I would change settings to do with any service I use, if upon logging into the particular service there was an advisory to do so. But a thinly disguised email, erm, no.

If you get any email advising of dire consequences to the services you use (bank, phone, IT, insurance for your pet Iguana) then just ignore it. If it really plays on your mind - if the nefarious ne'er-do-well has ticked all the psycho terrorism boxes - just refer the email to your IT guy / gal and then they'd tell you to delete it.