Mr. Teacher

I'll Have a Side of Spam with That (continued)

by John Pearson

A very odd incident occurred around mid-January. Someone in the district opened up Pandora's Inbox. They opened some sort of virus-containing e-mail that started a chain reaction throughout the server system. One morning, I checked my e-mail and had 10 messages, all from different people (none of whom I knew), all with the same subject."I need soup cans and pantyhose!" My first thought was, "WOOHOO!! Someone's having a par-tay!!"

Then it became obvious that some sort of spam bomb had gone off in the district server. By the end of the day, I had received about 20 more e-mails with the same subject; by the end of the week, over a hundred.

In recent months, the spam filter has been working again, and junk e-mails are very rare. Thank goodness, because with so many bogus messages, it's easy to accidentally delete an important message along with the garbage.

I certainly wouldn't want to accidentally throw away that e-mail titled "Top 10 Monty Python skits of all time."

John Pearson is a third-grade math and science teacher in Dallas, Texas.  He has degrees in mechanical engineering from Duke University and Texas A&M, so most consider his math abilities adequate enough to teach nine-year olds.  He is also the author of Learn Me Good (Lulu, 2006), a funny, fictionalized account of his first year in education.  Read more at www.learnmegood.com

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