Lost Words

On my street there are two guys that, when not collecting bottles and cans, hang out all day doing god-knows-what and cat-calling every girl that walks by. Has that ever worked? Has anyone ever whistled at a girl, or yelled, “Daddy like!” at a girl and had any sort of success? I’ve never seen a girl get cat-called then pull over and offer up their phone number (or anything other than the bird).

Almost daily, there’s a flyer imploring me to come to Jesus on my windshield, and/or between five and ten flyers announcing some dubstep DJ that’s going to be at a nearby club next month. Has anyone ever been saved by a windshield flyer, or pulled a thick laminated DJ announcement from their car door and said, “Oh, cool DJ Asshat is spinning on the 22nd—I’ll mark my calendar”?

There is a junk mail bin that fills to overflowing on a bi-weekly basis in my apartment lobby. Does anyone even know what it is? I’ve never even looked at it. It comes out of my mailbox straight into the bin, every day. Whoever it is, they obviously aren’t focus-testing the effectiveness of their advertising budget.

Then there’s the much more environmentally friendly email and comment spam. I can understand how this might have worked back in the nineties when the internet was still young and email was still somewhat novel. But with the advent of spam filters, it’s rare anyone ever even sees them. And most people moderating comments are savvy enough to know the difference after about a week of moderating a website with even the most modest of traffic.

In eight years of moderating comments on oneword.com, I’ve not once clicked on a spam link. I can spot spam in my peripheral vision at this point (or rather not-spam). Yet I can’t help but think that someone, somewhere has to be clicking on this stuff. What keeps spammers spamming?

Please advise.