“Warning, the Internet may contain traces of nuts.” Unknown

After going through a day from Hell, I am going to attempt to write a column that is hopefully somewhat sane, I hope.

I guess we all have a day or two that we end up regretting, but this one just wouldn’t stop. Although I use a computer on a daily basis, I could care to guess that eventually I would get a hint as to how to get along with the one that we have in our home. Forget about that chain of thought, because in this household it just isn’t going to happen anytime soon or perhaps even worse, never. And if that isn’t bad enough, my wife and I get similar shams over our telephones. Please notice I said telephones because we have a home phone with two telephone numbers, and of course we both have to have our wonderful cellphones as well.

With telephones I have to lump shams and scams together although both are well known to be on the internet. There is nothing more than I hate than annoying and pesky telephone calls, especially when there is absolutely nothing coming from the other end of the call. What I do like about my home phone system is that I can block anyone that I desire to and it’s easy to accomplish. On top of that, it automatically adds any known telemarketers and similar abusers of our home phones to its block list. I love it because I receive almost no political calls, and if I do, it only takes minutes to block that new annoying caller.

OK, maybe I am missing that free cruise that my wife and I won or fantastically low interest rates on our credit cards that we pay off each month (hint, no interest). So far we haven’t had to give a credit card number to bail out of jail some unknown grandson (or daughter to be fair). The IRS hasn’t called to tell us that we owe so many back taxes that if we don’t give a credit card number we will go to jail immediately. We haven’t accepted calls where someone stated that they could fix the numerous problems on our computer although they failed to notice the problem isn’t with the computer, it just might be me sitting in front of it. For those who would want us to believe that by giving out our checking account number would result in millions of dollars being deposited into it, we really don’t want to count that much money or even try to figure out how to spend it.

Then there’s a thing called spam on our computers. Now what’s funny here is that the spell check on our computer is trying to force me to change spam to Spam. What’s strange is that the two are probably more closely related to each other than most of us know. Spam on the computer consists of those most pesky emails containing advertisements as well as some that I am sure are truly scams as well. Spam, which I remember well from the sandwiches that I survived on while going to school, is a concoction in a can that some will tell you isn’t anything close to being edible by a human being or any other creature. The term “spam” may have very well came from a Monty Python sketch that was titled “Spam” and first televised in 1970. I doubt that I would ever eat Spam again, but I am sick and tired of it being shoved down my throat just about every time my wife or I open up our email account.

But if you know me by now, I have to mention that one sham all of us might just have witnessed came out of the State House located in Augusta, Maine. At first I didn’t think so, but now I am beginning to believe that a legislative committee just tried to pull the wool over our eyes over the so-called Maine Game Warden scandal. Do I understand correctly that there will be no investigation at all? That’s sad.

Lane Hiltunen of Windham wonders when sanity will return.