“You’ve got mail!” announces a voice on the tram.

How very 1990s, I think, imagining myself as a double-taking, pre-gravitas Tom Hanks in a remake of the lightweight AOL-based romantic comedy. I tear my attention away from my book and look up to see who uttered this famous refrain.

A man standing across the aisle is staring straight at me. OK, I’m no Tom Hanks but this guy’s definitely no Meg Ryan. It is unsettling. I look up and down the carriage for other potential sources.

“You’ve got mail!” says the man again, still staring at me. Our eyes meet. He nods in my direction in acknowledgement of attracting my attention. I don’t recognise him at all. Besides, if he was an acquaintance he would probably have said something more conventional such as “hello”.

He nods again, more insistently this time, evidently annoyed at my failure to interpret what his first nod meant. Oh no, we have entered that bizarre twilight zone of silent manspeak in which strangers on public transport communicate non-verbally by means of slightly embarrassed facial expressions. It’s a kind of commuter performance art.

His nodding means “Look! Look!”

I look up and down the carriage again and then back to him, raising my eyebrows. This means “Who, me?”

He nods again to indicate “Yes, you! Look!”

Now I lower my eyebrows. This means “I have no idea what you’re on about.”

Ha, that’ll force him to take drastic measures. What will happen now? Expect the unexpected, as they say. How thrilling!

“You’ve got mail!“ he says out loud, nodding slowly but emphatically one final time… and then he gestures in the direction of the book resting on my lap.

I lift the book to eye-level and check the cover to make sure I am not accidentally reading a book called You’ve Got Mail – which I am not. I look quizzically back at the man across the aisle. He ignores the book: he is still pointing towards my lap. In fact, he is pointing directly at my crotch.

Well, that was unexpected.

I look downwards. We are now both looking at my crotch, as indeed are other commuters who find themselves lucky enough to be within earshot and crotch-observation distance.

My crotch is illuminated resplendently with a large, bright envelope icon.

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Stoogie is trying out a pair of AI-enshittified smart specs. He is trying them out on me, in fact, but doesn’t know how to use them. This is because he doesn’t know what to use them for. Does anyone?

You’ll have to be a paid-up subscriber to Autosave is for Wimps to find out what Stoogie really wanted a spectacle-mounted video camera for – indeed, it’s the same gonzo reason as everyone else who buys them – and hear us hit the street corner in search of volunteers. But you can always sign up for a free seven-day trial, or sample a little more with a one-month sub. Or save quite a lot over 12 months with a cheap-as-chips annual subscription.

Con in 60 Seconds…

…is brought to you by Alistair Dabbs. It is a Bento Media production.

Also read Autosave is for Wimps on Substack every Friday (for paid subscribers only) and Dabbsy’s Curious Museum of Korean Spam on Mondays (free for everyone!)

[Photos © Josias Garibay, dlxmedia.hu and Meta]
[Sound effects by freesound_community]
[Additional voices by NaturalReader]

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Hey hey HEY, Korean spam fans! Welcome back to another instalment of Korean Spam catch-up, republishing Season 1 of my Curious Museum of Korean Spam featuring silly, strange and startling examples of unsolicited email received from South Korea in the early years of this century.

When I originally wrote this series, only half the Korean spam posts were available to non-paying subscribers. Now I’m making them free for everybody, week by week. And if I ticked the correct box in Substack’s Dashboard, these posts will remain free for a whole year. Or a whole six months. Tell you what, read them soon, just in case.

Because of the random way in which I posted the early episodes last year, they can be difficult to navigate. So what I’m going to do is email you briefly every Monday with direct links to these freshly reorganised tales of early-2000s unsolicited email ads from South Korea, so you don’t have to hunt for them.

Here we go with episodes 7, 8 and 9!

Season 1 Episode 7:

Season 1 Episode 8:

Season 1 Episode 9:

I have a self-flushing toilet.

Not one of those novelty models from Japan, mind. No indeed, my self-flushing lav uses a unique system. It must be a DIY job, er, I mean a custom build.

But what do I know? I had a peek inside and the insides are so unfamiliar I may just as well have been staring into an alternative toilet dimension of Lovecraftesque proportions. It’s all cogs, levers and pendulums surrounded by barbed wire and mystic runes. I think I spotted a Mayan calendar at the back and I can hear monks chanting. Cthulu would refuse to snip a cable on anything less.

“Do you have a screwdriver?” asks the plumber, who has turned up literally empty handed, except for the espresso I just made for him. “And a flashlight? Oh, and a pencil and some string?” Next he’ll be asking me for a wrench, copper piping and a blow torch.

I have called in a plumber because I do not want a self-flushing toilet.

Call me unadventurous but I would prefer a conventional crapper that flushes when you press a button, turn a handle or yank a chain. The one I have at the moment triggers the flush mechanism all by itself every 23 minutes, day and night. The noise is driving us nuts, not least that of the water meter by the front door tick-tick-ticking through the euros with every useless drain and refill.

The plumber keeps whistling through his teeth, puffing out his cheeks and making clicking noises with his tongue. At first, I thought he was trying to communicate in one of those South African languages and I wondered if I should respond in semaphore or by tapping out Morse code on my knee with spoons.

How hard can it be to make a privy work at the touch of a button? After all, everything works at the touch of a button these days, or at least the sales and promotional material say it does. Whether it’s an AI agent for work, an voice assistant at home, a project management suite for civil engineering or a surgery stuffed with brain surgery robotics, it’ll be marketed as “simple” and “easy to use.” One touch is all that’s required!

Obviously this is not true.

I saw a smart speaker advertised to say my entire library of banging tunes was instantly streamable upon me “saying a word”.

What, one word? Which word? “Skelf”? “Adscititious”? “Oxyphenbutazone”?

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Team leader thinks he is introducing agentic AI to us, oblivious to the fact that we’ve already been burning through this month’s tokens since 00:01 hours on 1 August. The problem is that whatever a team-member generates on his or her account is a secret as far as the rest of our accounts are concerned. Each of us has to start our prompt all the way back at the beginning to reach the same point.

You’ll have to be a paid-up subscriber to Autosave is for Wimps to today’s audio sketch to hear us making team leader aware of this nonsense. But you can always sign up for a free seven-day trial, or sample a little more with a one-month sub. Or save quite a lot over 12 months with a cheap-as-chips annual subscription.

Con in 60 Seconds…

…is brought to you by Alistair Dabbs. It is a Bento Media production.

Also read Autosave is for Wimps on Substack every Friday (for paid subscribers only) and Dabbsy’s Curious Museum of Korean Spam on Mondays (free for everyone!)

[Photo © Berke Citak on Unsplash]
[Sound effects by freesound_community]
[Additional voices by NaturalReader]

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When I originally wrote this series, only half the Korean spam posts were available to non-paying subscribers. Now I’m making them free for everybody, week by week.

This also means everybody can comment on each post. I find reading and responding to reader comments under posts a lot of fun, no really, and they’re much easier to get your head around than Substack’s Chat thing.

Because of the random way in which I posted the early episodes last year, they can be difficult to navigate. So what I’m going to do is email you briefly every Monday with direct links to these freshly reorganised tales of early-2000s unsolicited email ads from South Korea, so you don’t have to hunt for them.

Here we go with episodes 4, 5 and 6!

Season 1 Episode 4: What is Korean spam? Take a look at some samples

Season 1 Episode 5:

Season 1 Episode 6:

A minicab driver is cross with me. As we swing around the tidy little streets of English 60s-built suburbia, all of which look the same, none of which look familiar, he fixes me in his rear-view mirror and snarls: “Don’t you know where you live?”

“I know where I live”, I confirm to him in calming tones. “I’ve told you my address so now we both know where I live. What I don’t know is how to get there. I was rather hoping that you might.”

The boring backstory: I spent the evening at a social event, left it a bit late, and now couldn’t calculate a public transport route that would get me home before daylight. I considered my options. Thumb a lift. Jump on the back of a lorry. Commandeer a passing motorbike at gunpoint. Hijack a 747. Activate my Star Trek transporter.

In the end, I phoned my local minicab number to ask if they could beam me up come and fetch me. What I hadn’t expected is to have to explain step-by-step to the driver how to get me from the kerb outside the social event to the one outside my front door.

Should I pull out my smartphone and read out directions? I reach to my pocket. All I find is a packet of paper tissues and pocket lint. Of course! Now I remember! It is 1992: smartphones haven’t been invented yet. Nor has Uber. Happy times.

I lean forward to get a better view of the dashboard. “He doesn’t even have a sat-nav,” I mutter under my breath before realising this makes sense too: in 1992 the only place you would find a sat-nav was in an aeroplane cockpit. “Darn you, linear time!”

I curse myself for not hailing one of the licensed city taxis – the ubiquitous London “black cabs” – even though none was passing for me to hail. Licensed cab drivers, you see, have a photographic memory of all the streets: what is generally called “The Knowledge”. Minicab drivers, on the other hand, have what they call “The Ignorance”.

My driver seemed friendly enough when I got in. “Take me to 10 Acacia Park Drive, my good man,” I said. “No problem,” he said, casually asking whether it was part of the new Acacia Park housing development. Yes I suppose it must be, I replied, but confessed I had only just moved into the flat that week and was unfamiliar with the area. That was why I had phoned for a minicab rather than, say, walking.

Ten minutes later, we are in Acacia Park.

Ten minutes after that, we are still driving around Acacia Park, slowing down to read every street sign. The driver begins harrumphing.

I do hate it when minicab drivers harrumph. It augments the odour of stale sick coming off the seats with increasing levels of the acrid burning rubber stench of the driver’s rancid breath. Still struggling with a broken handle to lower the passenger window, I gently suggest he stop the car for a moment and consult his A-Z street map.

Eventually, by chance I spot my flat in the hazy distance and I cry: “There it is!” The car lurches to an emergency halt. As far as the driver is concerned he has taken me home. I do not argue since the combination of his breath and the ambient stink of the vehicle’s interior furnishing is causing my eyes to water and my stomach to heave. Paying up and getting out of the car is a blessing, even if my home is another quarter of a mile ahead.

The lesson I learnt that day was that I should take pains to be precise in the way I express unfamiliar concepts. My mistake was to agree with paintstripper-breath that I lived in a generic area called ‘Acacia Park’ without specifying that my flat was on its outskirts. The driver took me directly to the centre which, being new to the area, I didn’t recognise, and promptly got us both lost.

This experience turned me into an annoying client. When asking for something in a shop, I repeat it three times, just in case. When conversing with human till assistants, I use monosyllabic words pronounced slowly in a near-shout and I gesticulate, charades-style, for emphasis. All that’s missing from my performance is a thin moustache and a pith helmet.

The experience also turned me into an annoying software trainer.

While training, I am armed with a quiver of interface jargon arrows that I fire off accurately and precisely, hitting the red bull every time. For me, “buttons” and “icons” are not the same thing – oh no no, young bucky, not the same thing at all! Neither are “tabs” and “titles”, “panels” and “panes” or “pop-ups” and “drop-downs”. For heaven’s sake, “pop-ups” go up and “drop-downs” go down! How can they possibly be the same? And if I can’t even describe what they are, how can I expect my trainees to know what to click on?

Yes, I may be tedious and annoyingly pedantic, but I am clear.

The last time I relaxed my attitude during a training course, it took only a few minutes before things fell apart. As is quite common, one trainee in the class was struggling with having to cope with learning new software while a tediously annoying pedantic bastard was constantly droning away and telling her what to do.

Thinking it would be helpful for her, I stopped using the proper names for the various tools and buttons scattered around the interface and, instead, resorted to referring to them by cute nicknames such as “the pointy tool”, “that balloon thing” and “the burger button”.

Yes, I am aware that “burger button” is what the burger button is actually called. It’s this one that you see in apps for calling up additional menus:

The thing is, if I asked an average reasonably sane person to click or tap on a “burger button”, it would take them even longer to find it. The button above does not, in any way whatsoever, look like a burger. A cake slice, perhaps. Or a Scooby-snack.

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Young people have discovered that it is possible to switch off a mobile phone and spend more time In Real Life. Pushback against the insidious march of tech into every corner of our lives is on the rise among Gen-Z. This in turn has morphed into a pseudo-political movement of liberty, self-expression and performance art among the kind of people who love to party.

Luddites? Absolutely. They are even reclaiming the name for themselves, launching the so-called ‘Summer of Ludd’ in New York back at the beginning of July. I fancy a bit of that action… or, that is, in-action.

You’ll have to be a paid-up subscriber to Autosave is for Wimps to today’s audio sketch to hear me launcing my own personal Summer of Ludd down at the local coffee shop. But you can always sign up for a free seven-day trial, or sample a little more with a one-month sub. Or save quite a lot over 12 months with a cheap-as-chips annual subscription.

Con in 60 Seconds…

…is brought to you by Alistair Dabbs. It is a Bento Media production.

Also read Autosave is for Wimps on Substack every Friday (for paid subscribers only) and Dabbsy’s Curious Museum of Korean Spam on Mondays (free for everyone!)

[Photo © Jean-Louis Aubert on Unsplash]
[Sound effects by freesound_community]
[Additional voices by NaturalReader]

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A phishing email has turned up warning me about the dangers of phishing emails. Talk about meta.

The email is impersonating a bank that says I should be on the alert for unsolicited messages from people impersonating them. It invites me to click on a link to sign in to my account where I will be able to find out more. The return address is the usual firebox.com nonsense with an Eastern European username that’s full of ‘k’s, ‘t’s and ‘z’s, like the sound of someone being electrocuted.

I was tempted to open the link in Firefox Focus and see what happens. I mean, I could type literally anything into the phisher’s login screen, it wouldn’t matter; and whatever screens that follow might provide me with some idle amusement. But it would certainly ask me to confirm an email address, and while I can – again – type in any old bollocks, that’s a thin trail I really can’t be arsed sweeping up later.

That’s the lazy, cynical Londoner that still dwells within me… despite having brexited to France a number of years ago. You may yourself be a Londoner and take exception to being defamed by me as being lazy. I mean it as a compliment: laziness is efficient. Come on, take the noun ‘Londoner’: it’s just the word ‘London’ with –‘er’ stuck on the end. How lazy/efficient is that?

Take, for example, where I was brought up: Leeds in West Yorkshire. I was not a ‘Leedser’: I was a ‘Leodensian’. Doubly so, in fact, as I am also an ‘Old Leodensian’, having attended Leeds Grammar School. Leeds has one syllable; Leodensian has five. Not efficient.

They play these kind of local town name games with inhabitants in France too, and it is no less unpredictable. OK, so people in Paris are ‘Parisiens’ and I am a ‘Montpellerian’. Easy. But then inhabitants of the hilly town Angoulême, home of the (in)famous comics festival, are… ‘Angoumoisins’. How is anyone supposed to guess that?

This is rendered more more complex still by the fact that France is full of some very strange town and village names. There’s a one not too far from me called Viols-le-fort. Spelling and grammar quibbles aside, this directly translates as ‘Rape-him-hard’. I hesitate to say it out loud. Perhaps someone who lives there is known as a ‘Rape-him-harder’. (Actually it’s a ‘Violifortin’. See what I mean?)

Me, I tend to find myself forever surrounded by people who come from this Spanish town:

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Stoogie ordered some new kit using of the project’s hardware budget and it turned up this morning. What a pleasure it is to slice open the boxes with a box cutter, expertly scissor through the sticking tape on the polythene wrapping, and carefully peel away that sticky film they put on everything.

Plug it all in and… that’s when the ads began popping up. No, really.

Don’t believe me? Listen for yourself.

You’ll have to be a paid-up subscriber to Autosave is for Wimps to play today’s audio sketch and hear how we dealt with the issue. But you can always sign up for a free seven-day trial, or sample a little more with a one-month sub. Or save quite a lot over 12 months with a cheap-as-chips annual subscription.

Con in 60 Seconds…

…is brought to you by Alistair Dabbs. It is a Bento Media production.

Also read Autosave is for Wimps on Substack every Friday (for paid subscribers only) and Dabbsy’s Curious Museum of Korean Spam on Mondays (free for everyone!)

[Photo © 2017 Joshua Earle on Unsplash]
[Sound effects by freesound_community]
[Additional voices by NaturalReader]

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[Perhaps I should have mentioned this last Monday – heh – but I’m in vacation mood and didn’t notice it myself.]

To keep you in the mood until Season 3 begins in a few weeks’ time, I will be unlocking and, in some cases, reposting the early episodes from the original Season 1 to make them available to everybody – whether you are a paid subscriber, free subscriber, non-subscribed Substack refusenik or (most likely of all) an AI scrapebot thieving my material to engross the unearned income of multi-billionaire dead-head techbro Nazi wankers.

Because of the random way in which I posted the early episodes last year, they can be difficult to navigate. So what I’m going to do is email you briefly every Monday with direct links to these freshly reorganised tales of early-2000s unsolicited email ads from South Korea, so you don’t have to hunt for them.

Here goes with the first lot. They’re very basic but I was just getting into my groove back then. I hope you enjoy them.

Season 1 Episode 0: What is Korean spam? Take a look at some samples

Season 1 Episode 1:

Season 1 Episode 2:

Season 1 Episode 3:

I do not write names in a little black book of vengeance. Nor do I maintain a list of “mortal enemies” on a failing late-1980s Verbatim 5.25in floppy disk, like Sheldon Cooper. I don’t need to. Karma catches up to them without intervention from me.

As I clumsily steer my skiff across the seas of existence, marauders who take pleasure in puncturing holes in my fragile hull before careering into the distance, cackling away, invariably end up dashed against the rocks of karma. No need to lure them on. They do it all by themselves, just give them time.

Patience is a virtue, and I don’t mind waiting.

Despite me not maintaining a physical list of miscreants, several do spring to mind. There was that self-important arse in my early days of customer publishing who would call 15 times a day to harangue me about inconsequential problems with the print production of his IT client’s magazine. When I investigated the problems, they turned out to be the result of the self-same arse ringing everybody else on the team 15 times a day to harangue them as well.

Then there was that editor of a computer mag who commissioned me to write a detailed piece based on some information she was going to send me. She didn’t send it to me, but she kept asking when my copy would be ready. I would tell her I’d write it as soon as she sent me the information she promised. So she decided to strike me off her rota of regular freelancers for “being difficult”.

And there was that bloke who became editor of another computer magazine I’d been working on for years. The week he took on the role, he stopped all work from being sent my way and directed all commissions to his friends instead.

Oh the unwritten list is endless! That garage in the Pyrenees that sold me dodgy snowchains for the car. The newly arrived post office employee who refused to fetch my envelope as doing so would be “an impossible task” even through it was on the shelf right behind him. It goes on and on.

OK, I don’t think any of these individuals died a cruel, unusual or (my personal preference) amusing death. In fact, I have no idea if they’re still in the land of the living or not.

But I do know that…

• those computer magazines didn’t last long afterwards

• the garage in the Pyrenees went out of business

• the post office jobsworth ended up first in line for redundancy

If the arse in my first story has died, it bothers me not the slightest that he may have passed away peacefully in his own bed and surrounded by his loving family. Because I know he will have done so while remembered by me and others as being an arse. Because that’s what he was in life. A total arse.

There you have it: karma done and dusted, thank you very much.

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I was so pleased with the public transport smartphone app that I had to use during a weekend holiday break that I foolishly showed it off to a couple of colleagues when I returned to work. “It’s so simple!” I told them. “You can buy your ticket in three taps!”

So impressed was one project manager that he invited me to demonstrate it to the User Experience experts working on our current project, so they could learn a thing or two about sleek app interface design.

Well, that’s what I thought. What actually happened was… well, you’ll have to listen to find out.

You’ll have to be a paid-up subscriber to Autosave is for Wimps to play today’s audio sketch and hear my disastrous app demo in front of the UX team. But you can always sign up for a free seven-day trial, or sample a little more with a one-month sub. Or save quite a lot over 12 months with a cheap-as-chips annual subscription.

Con in 60 Seconds…

…is brought to you by Alistair Dabbs. It is a Bento Media production.

Also read Autosave is for Wimps on Substack every Friday (for paid subscribers only) and Dabbsy’s Curious Museum of Korean Spam on Mondays (free for everyone!)

[Photo © 2021 engin akyurt on Unsplash]
[Sound effects by freesound_community]
[Additional voices by NaturalReader]

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Dabbsy’s Curious Museum of Korean Spam

Season 2: Episode 21

An occasional recipient of spam email sent from South Korea in the early 2000s would be accustomed to the fun, neon-coloured and uselessly deranged products thurst into their inboxes on a frequent basis. Those victim to receiving Korean spam by the container-load – as I was, at the time – will remember that no stone was ever left unturned in the spammer’s desperation to sell you junk.

This week’s exhibit is a fine example. The ad design is every bit as ordinary as the product itself. As you can see… ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, an obligatory note to encourage accidental readers to subscribe:

OK, let’s try that again. As you can see in the example below, this must be the dullest ad for the dullest mail-order product we have yet covered:

When I say “dull” I mean that the ad uses fewer than 15 fonts, all the text is upright, and not a single Korean fellow is thrusting a thumbs-up gesture in your face. And what is it selling?

A pipe dredge! For my fellow Europeans and Antipodeans, I believe this to be an Americanism for a “sink unblocker”. It comprises a pliable metal cable in a sleeve, ending with a coiled section, which you thread into the drainage pipe under the sink via a plug-hole. A rotation wotsit built into the handle at the top end turns the cable and coil, letting you drill slowly into the revolting gunge that you have carelessly allowed to accumulate there, thereby loosening it and breaking it up so it moves along (hopefully) into wider pipes for evacuation.

It’s a mainstay of all DIY and hardware shops. Cheap and boring.

Cheap it may be (9,000 won is just over 5 €) but not boring at all for the Korean spammers! For the benefit of those who have never seen a sink unblocker before, the ad sells its benefits right from the top:

“Clear blocked sinks, toilets and drains in a flash!” it says, shouting a promise that I’ve heard from my own doctor more than once: “We’ll clear your blockages in no time.”

There’s another mention of toilets in the bullet list at the bottom of the ad but the spammers sensibly avoid any further detail regarding such use. I suspect they had a Plan B in the event that they were unable to clear their warehouse of cheapo pipe dredges in this campaign. Plan B would be to shift the unsold remainder by rebranding them as toilet unblockers.

Come on, you’re not seriously going to feel at ease twirling potato peel out of the U-bend under the kitchen sink with the same gadget that you’ve just used that same morning to spear Grandma’s clay-like compacted constipation bombs down the dunny? No end of sterilisation in bleach or white spirit will take away those feelings of domestic violation (nor remove the olfactory memory from your nostrils).

Buy a second pipe dredge while stocks last. And label them according to which plumbed room each is to be assigned.

This text assures you that not only is a pipe dredge a household essential, it will last a lifetime. “You’ll be using it time and time again!” You will if you keep inviting Grandma to stay.

But the strangest part of the ad is the following:

Apparently the quality of your 5 € pipe dredge is backed by a 100 million won Product Liability Insurance policy. Why the manufacturer thinks it might be hit by a 60,000 € claim is a mystery to me, as is why it’s got Samsung’s logo on it. Surely the spammer could avoid being sued by adding a label on the product to remind users not to operate the pipe dredger until Grandma has finished.

See you back here next Monday for another (freebie!) exhibit from the museum.

Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, media tech training and fortune-telling. This article is being made available to read for free courtesy of my paying subscribers. You can repay their generosity by restacking and sharing the article to your own network of friends and colleagues, so they can read it for free as well.

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Love it or hate it, the tiresome cliché remains true: the key to bending generative and agentic AI to your will – as a user, that is – lies in the clarity of your prompt. There is no end of training courses that teach this one skill.

This might explain why everybody hates AI-based Help chatbots on websites and SAAS platforms. It’s not the AI chatbot’s fault it takes you round in circles, repeatedly contradicting the advice it just gave you and steadfastly refusing to understand what you are asking. That’s simply how genAI works: it is designed to be an overrated autocomplete fuckwit.

Once of my favourite customer-facing AI fuckwits is the one called ‘Bo’ that has been gleefully confusing, taunting and harrassing AirAsia customers for months. Do try it out: when you get there, click on the bespectacled slaphead at the bottom right corner of the page and start a pointless conversation about flight cancellations. Or sit back and chuckle as you read about someone else doing this, courtesy of the Byline Times here on Substack:

Byline Times

Protective Obsolescence: 'Talk to Bo'

Bo is here to help. But his glassy gaze and reflexive cheer conceals something more malign. He wants your booking number. You provide. He wants your booking number. You provide again. He remembers that he has your booking number, he just forgot. If you ask for a human, he regrets that there are no humans here. There’s only Bo…

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2 months ago · 41 likes · 2 comments · Byline Times

This got me wondering whether the general public need to be taught how to prompt these AI chatbots. After all, they are being rolled out everywhere. If you don’t know how to talk to an AI chatbot, you will never again be able to book an appointment with your doctor, change your train tickets, cancel a subscription, alert your bank to a scam, or even – give it time, this is on its way –call for the police or an ambulance.

Obviously none of these organisations can afford the better implementations of genAI for their customer-facing chatbots, nor will they ever be upgraded thanks to new per-token pricing. To get an AI-based Help chatbot to actually help you, you need to rephrase your questions. What the world needs now isn’t just love, sweet love, but also plain-language training courses in how to prompt a chatbot.

For example, I found that if I ask for something utterly impossible from the outset, my Help request is routed to a human within two question-answer rounds. Hey AI chatbot, I’ll say, I need help elevationing my flangewanger through the gotcooties. Within seconds, I’m in the queue to speak to a real person.

They should teach this to old people who struggle with new technology. Lesson One: How to copy-paste text Marc Bolan lyrics to a Help chat window.

Some colleagues have expressed to me a nostalgia for pre-AI Help agents, such is their infuriation with modern genAI fuckwits. No, they are not joking. I can only assume they have forgotten how much worse those used to be. So very, very much worse.

So bad indeed that I dug out a piece I wrote a few years ago for another publication about the travails of pre-AI era Help systems that took you from a retarded old-school chatbot to an overworked Helpline assistant trying to keep 20 customer conversations on the go simultaneously, like a circus juggler spinning plates.

I’m on holiday and I hope you are / will be too. Enjoy this blast from the past and I’ll see you back here next week.

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We have polished off the aperitif snacks in the first 20 minutes of play. That’s how boring the football, er, “soccer” is at the moment. We are bored and hungry. Luckily, I prepared a home-made pizza and I suggest that my host pops it in the oven while I pause the match livestream. He says it is not necessary to pause because he can turn on the oven and monitor the baking of our pizza by video link remotely from his smartphone.

What could go wrong? Now that would be telling – when you should be listening.

You’ll have to be a paid-up subscriber to Autosave is for Wimps to play today’s audio sketch and find out whether Stoogie gets the pizza baked or ignites his flat but you can always sign up for a free seven-day trial, or sample a little more with a one-month sub. Or save quite a lot over 12 months with a cheap-as-chips annual subscription.

Con in 60 Seconds…

…is brought to you by Alistair Dabbs. It is a Bento Media production.

Also read Autosave is for Wimps on Substack every Friday (for paid subscribers only) and Dabbsy’s Curious Museum of Korean Spam on Mondays (free for everyone!)

[Photo © 2021 Photo de Fabrizio Pullara on Unsplash]
[Sound effects by freesound_community]
[Additional voices by NaturalReader]

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Tech-dictatorial dystopia isn’t as interesting as I had hoped.

Me, I was expecting it to be full of shady but sharply dressed fellows flitting from shadow to shadow at night, glimpsed only in the neon reflecting off the rain-drenched streets. You know, a bit like in every bloody Ridley Scott film in the 1980s. And Alien.

Instead, our modern dystopia is sort of grey and boring. Nobody goes postal and tries to “take down the system”. They just keep calm and carry on, possibly assuming the boring greyness means everything is perfectly OK. So much for my dreams of sharp-dressed figures dashing across neon-lit streets. What we got is dudgeons trudging through the brightly lit aisles in Aldi in their pyjamas.

I feel cheated. Where’s the alien invasion we were promised? Or the overnight take-over by the machines when they achieve sentience? Where’s my Dead Robot Zombie Cop From Outer Space? “50 per cent alive! 50 per cent dead! 100 per cent cop!!!”

But then, I’m out of touch. Consider my dress sense: t-shirt and shorts during the summer, t-shirt and jeans during the winter. That’s how old people dress. Not like stylish youngsters like the one below, sitting across the aisle from me on the plane this week.

Exactly why he wanted to dress like a yellow sperm escapes me. I didn’t ask. If he was hoping to impress the young lady beside him, he’d better hope she’s never seen Woody Allen in almost identical sperm cosplay in his, er, seminal satire about reproduction and relationships.

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Our project manager is worried that our client is charging towards a scope-creep precipice. So she asked Stoogie and me to chat about it privately to see what we think, over a spot of lunch. Nice bistrot, looks authentic… until they tell me the menu is online-only and that I have to order my food by scanning a QR code.

Bah, what could go wrong? Now that would be telling – when you should be listening.

You’ll have to be a paid-up subscriber to Autosave is for Wimps to play today’s audio sketch and find out how my business lunch date turned out but you can always sign up for a free seven-day trial, or sample a little more with a one-month sub. Or save quite a lot over 12 months with a cheap-as-chips annual subscription.

Con in 60 Seconds…

…is brought to you by Alistair Dabbs. It is a Bento Media production.

Also read Autosave is for Wimps on Substack every Friday (for paid subscribers only) and Dabbsy’s Curious Museum of Korean Spam on Mondays (free for everyone!)

[Photo © 2021 Sandy Millar on Unsplash]
[Sound effects by freesound_community]
[Additional voices by NaturalReader]

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Dabbsy’s Curious Museum of Korean Spam

Season 2: Episode 20

Wacky clip-art and daft graphics are standard features of Korean spam as you, my faithful reader, knows only too well. This week, though, I bring you something a little different: just one photo, some fairly basic and repetitive text, and that’s it.

Boooorinnnng. Or maybe not so. Today you will marvel at how much nonsense and contradictory sales blah can fit into one of the smaller exhibits in my museum of early 21st century unsolicited email from South Korea.

First, an obligatory note to encourage accidental readers to subscribe:

When I first saw the following spam ad in my inbox, I burst out laughing. Obviously the laughter wore off by the time I had received it another 50 times in that same week, but have a look for yourself:

Just when you think you’ve got a handle on this Korean spam thing, a spammer has another trick up their sleeve. In this case, it’s a photo of a sweaty man in long red trousers kicking a punchbag… to convince you to take out a bank loan. What?

Come to think of it, maybe he’s the debt collector if you miss a payment deadline. That’s certainly one way to filter out the frivolous applications. “Pay up over 36 months or this man will come round to your house and kick the shit out of you.” (This is just my little joke, by the way: the text in the ad says nothing of the sort.)

It’s definitely for loan sharks, though. It does say that perfectly clearly.

Not just any loan. This is a fast loan. The black text above the red heading reads: “Are you looking for a quick loan that gives you peace of mind?” Me, I’d have more peace of mind if I didn’t think a sweaty man in red troos was going to ‘do a Michael Flatley’ on my face.

But hang on. Let’s run the AI translation app on some of the fine print…

This set of characters is repeated further down the ad. My app translates it as “Fastron is…” or, with an intercap, “FastRon is…”. Is FastRon a far-eastern brand name? The name of a Korean financial institution?

Then I thought… it might be phonetic Korean for the English words “Fast Loan”. To assume this, though, involves playing along with oh-so-hilarious 1970s British comic belief that nobody in the Far East can pronounce the letter “L”. While in this case it might even be true – that is, “fast roan” might be how this Korean spammer pronounced “fast loan” out loud – I am certainly not happy with the idea.

Much more appealing is my alternative explanation. This is Fast Ron:

He kicks so fast, does Fast Ron! Almost as fast as getting a loan agreed by his namesake. Indeed a loan of as much as 50 million won! (That’s about 28,500 euros.)

I won’t bore you with the rest of the text; suffice to say it’s full of overoptimistic projections of how quickly your loan application will be accepted. “Instant payment” is just one example of the kind of utter bollocks being promised to desperate people with weak minds.

Not least, there are the contradictions. Part of the following small print states: “Even customers with low credit ratings can check their eligible loan amount and applicable interest rate within 24 hours of applying.”

24 hours, eh? What happened to “instant payment”? In fact, we’re probably talking about “no payment”, given what the same ad says at the top:

This states: “It is absolutely impossible for those with a poor credit history to obtain a loan.” Hmm, I’m sensing a refreshing absence of ambiguity here.

And if you don’t like rejection? Take it up with Ron.

See you back here next Monday for another (freebie!) exhibit from the museum.

Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, media tech training and fortune-telling. This article is being made available to read for free courtesy of my paying subscribers. You can repay their generosity by restacking and sharing the article to your own network of friends and colleagues, so they can read it for free as well.

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AI can format the curriculum vitae (i.e. resumé) and write your covering letter of bollocking intent. The really tricky part of a job application, though, is if the interviewer decides to go noseying around in your social media history.

We all have something to hide. The problem is that vast numbers of us – and most expecially men – tend to take anatomical photos of something they really should keep hidden and upload them to the internet for anyone to discover. If you’re thinking “I don’t upload my dickpics to the internet, I send them via messaging apps” then I apologise for breaking this to you but it’s exactly the same thing.

Young people entering the job market for the first time are warned to fillet their social media history as best they can. This will be easier for the next generation as legislation is trying to make it increasingly difficult to build much of a social media history before they reach (official) adulthood.

But for those doing it now, it’s not just pimpled hairy bits to worry about; nor merely a matter of covering up a one-off display of xenophobia or boorish masculine behaviour: even innocent expressions of desire or emotion can be taken out of context.

For example, imagine if British actor and TV presenter Mark Curry should – heaven forbid! – be subject to an attempt on his life by an unidentified ne’er-do-well, you will be regretting that night you staggered out of a pub in Castleford and tweeted to the world: “I COULD MURDER A CURRY”.

Not that any such social media history faux pas would come back to bite me at a job interview. The last time I applied for permanent employment was in 1992. In those days, the internet was stored on wax cylinders and anybody using a Pentium was legally obliged to hire a servant to run ahead waving a red flag. There was resolutely no social media – unless you include the pre-curry verbal banter in that aforementioned Castleford pub.

Mobile phones did exist but not that many people had one until a few years further into the decade. I seem to remember reading that even by the Millennium, only 5% of mobile phone users knew how to write text messages using lower case letters. Today, of course, everyone with a functioning brain knows how to do this.

So back at my interview in 1992, the interviewer simply read my CV, checked that really was my name in the computer magazines I showed him (I’m no John Smith) and, one hopes, asked my referees to confirm I hadn’t openly expressed any murderous intent towards late-1980s Blue Peter presenters.

The one thing I wasn’t asked to do at my interview was take an exam. I have since learnt that being asked to undergo a live test of competency in the role you are seeking is to be expected. I dare say, what with AI fucking everything up for everyone everywhere, it is now absolutely essential.

And yet, the first I heard of this requirement was a good 10 years or so later, by which time my freelancing career (ha ha ha, that word again!) had incorporated various aspects of journalism and media training. A ‘resting’ actor, who had been attending one of my InDesign courses in order to seek casual work as a sub-editor, had landed himself a job interview with a national newspaper. Result!

He didn’t tell me outright. I found out in a somewhat mysterious manner: one morning he sent me a series of terse queries by SMS which I assumed I was expected to answer. So he’d text me Word count? or Spell check? and I’d fire back equally curt replies such as Window>Info and Ctrl+I.

Only later did it dawn on me that he’d been surreptitiously messaging me from the job interview itself during his subbing test. That’s pretty much what job candidates do with genAI these days, isn’t it? I’m way ahead of time. Think of me as a proto-AI.

You couldn’t really get away with such shenanigans when being interviewed for technical jobs – at least, not back then. I used to wonder how some drop-file jockey from Human Resources at a big software company would evaluate an applicant’s programming skills. Ask them to tidy up a code segment or fill in the gaps from multiple choice, perhaps? Imagine the text messages I’d get from my coding trainees…

Any serious recruiter of programmers these days will, of course, skim off the cream of equally serious contenders through a coding challenge community such as CodinGame. Let the kids have their fun while at the same time proving they can do the business. It certainly beats accepting on trust an applicant who says they have a five-year-old college certificate in Pascal.

What’s surprising about applying for jobs in the IT field, though, is that nobody seems to give two hoots any more about your social media history. I stress: for IT jobs.

So while maybe only about 10% of recruiters bother to pry into what you’ve been up to on the likes of Instaspam and Fessebook, researchers reckon a rather more impressive 95% are probably running public record checks on your criminal history. Almost three quarters of recruiters do not believe your identification papers are genuine and are actively investigating their veracity.

I reckon at least half are also checking whether you’ve tested for drug and alcohol abuse. (Perhaps that’s not so surprising: this is the IT industry after all.)

Occasionally, for personal amusement, I apply for a full-time job. It’s partly to force myself to update my CV, partly to enjoy the drama of selection process, and not least the potential opportunity to try out a company’s toilets that I would otherwise never get to waz in.

Needless to say, I struggle to get a rejection letter let alone an interview slot. Is it my age? Are my skills obsolete? Surely it can’t be the array of fake names I use? I’m not trying to hide my true identity so much as give my future office colleagues a laugh when someone from HR has to introduce me to them as ‘Dick Pooler’ or ‘Clint Rubber’.

No, I suspect that an evil AI has been given the task of investigating my past and one of its evil algorithms has set off evil alarm bells.

Now if you want evil, forget about checking my records. Instead, check my records.

For younger readers, “records” are what we used to call those vinyl music discs that you’re all playing. I don’t play mine; I don’t even have a record player any more. Mme D has been asking me for the last 25 years when I will be donating these records to a worthy cause. Answer: never. Boxes of them, unplayed for a generation, even followed me to France.

And this is my downfall. Because buried in that stack of vinyl is evidence that will incriminate me forever. There will be no coming back once this get out. I know this because I have just rediscovered the boxes in the cellar. Well, they were in the cellar; I actually rediscovered them in the doorway of my home office.

The process of rediscovery began gently. At the top of the seven-inch singles was this little gem from 1971…

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