Deception and consequence

Today I received an email from a "friend" of mine that was pretty obvious spam. This "friend" was trying to generate interest in a website that she had recently become involved with. I've copied the email below, with certain names edited for confidentiality:

Hello Hello!

First off, I’d like to start with a Congratulations:

Congratulations to you!  I went through my entire contact list, and when I saw your name, I immediately thought, “Yes! Connor is someone I want to keep updated about my life.”

(If I’ve misjudged you, please let me know, and I will take you off this list.)

(If I’ve accurately pegged you as caring, intellectually inquisitive, and kind, read on!)

Well, in September, I joined C-------.com, a company that specializes in interactive video.

“Praytell S---, what is Interactive Video?” you ask.

Interactive Video is video that responds to user choices.  You can see a sample on our site: www.c-------.com.   In the example, a spokesperson asks for responses to your questions.  Interactive video is great for marketing, training, and surveying in an engaging way.  Boring video and text are out, engaging interactive video is in!  The video helps create a customized viewing experience for the user.  Also, our reporting engine lets you know right away how people are responding.  So if you’re doing an interactive video of a politician having a conversation with constituents visiting the web site, you can see what issues they were interested in and what direction they leaned towards.

We are currently in the midst of building a training product, called A-----, that helps people improve their interpersonal skills in the workplace. I'm pretty excited about this.  Most people are already good with people, so just a _slight_ improvement in people skills could be worth a couple extra hundred thousand to you over the course of your career.  We include lessons and interactive roleplay exercises that are fun and encourage users to explore how to act in different business situations with people.

“S---, I must know: how is the company doing?” you implore.

Things are going great. We're now up to three full time people and a number of part-timers. We've signed several key customers, and we're smack in the middle of building interactive videos for them.  We've also partnered with some terrific professional script writers, videographers, and video editing experts. The result is that we now have the ability to deliver top quality interactive videos for all applications.

“How can I help!?” you graciously offer.

Well, we are just ramping up our marketing efforts. If you think your organization or some other organization can make use of this cool new approach to online communications, please get in touch and we'll follow-up.

We'll certainly appreciate any assistance or ideas as well!

Warm regards, "Former friend of Connor's"

I was enraged. Here is my stinging response:

Have you sent this email to each of your friends, and just ran a search and replace for the name of the person? I noticed you only mentioned my name once in the first paragraph, and the rest of it was a pretty strange boilerplate email.

It's like getting an obvious mass text message but it pretends as if it's really only addressed to you. Let me be clear, I am furious if that is the case. I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life to making sure that your new website fails terribly. I'm going to leave the most withering, awful feedback possible. So I suppose congratulations really ARE in order, S---.

Congratulations: you've just made the worst enemy of your life. I'll see you in hell.