The FBI Doesn’t Use Comic Sans
The first story I wrote for this quarter of Advance Fiction. Unedited in a sense.
It always starts off slowly and without any cognoscente thought of what you’re doing. The beginning is a simple cribbing of a guitar lick then progresses to incorporating a little duck walk, and by the end it is nothing but self deprecation and Nickelback. And no one remembers how to “Twist’n’shout” or what it’s like to be a mannish boy. However, that isn’t the story. Certainly it pertains to the story by tangents and through the ether, but it isn’t the story; my story. Rather, my story doesn’t begin with an impressionable youth admiring the sound of hip black music, but with an e-mail. Well, honestly, it begins a bit before that. It’s possible that it starts when I was a little girl and my poppa told me that my main goal as a proper Jewish woman was to keep a good house and take care of my brood of many children; children with an emphasis on grand.
The most probable start is likely before my bat mitzvah. About half an hour before I had to read from the Torah before my father and relatives, when I let Morty Selstein finger me behind the synagogue. His lack of confidence, sweaty hands and inability to bring me any pleasure being what soured me on Jewish boys for the rest of my life to the disapproval and anger of my father. It is as likely a start as any being a Jewish girl from Trenton, New Jersey who doesn’t like Jewish boys and decides to flirt with every goy she could bat an eyelash at. This episode is what brought me to marry a Guido, not simply an Italian American or a Goombah, both of which in hindsight are preferable to the de-ironized, self-identified Guido.
Marrying into money is a lot like being a giant child, except you’re expected to have sex at least once a week. Which, I guess in a sense being the housewife of someone well-to-do is in a sense, pedophilia. I guess, I can’t complain too much as I get a couple grand a month to do with whatever I like as long as he gets dinner and the kids aren’t selling drugs. Money is important, but for some reason, when my husband leaves the envelope of Benjis on my night stand every first of the month, it seems less important. I try to cope with an apathetic husband and ennui by spending that couple thousand each month on activities to waste time until I have to pick my kids up from school or have to cook dinner. I run the gauntlet of activities that are made specifically for women of my means and free time. I start with Pilates, but that lasts only a month because I realize that I hate sweating. Then I move to yoga because I figure the flexibility might be useful, and that it can bring me serenity that my lazily chaotic life can use. But, that only lasts a few weeks after I fall asleep in the upward facing dog. Next, I join a book club with other local housewives, and that is another disaster. I realize my mistake when discussing Pride and Prejudice and one of the member’s says she hates Kiera Knightly. However, despite my quitting the club, the group of housewives still invites me to parties that I have to attend for appearances, and eat fancy cheeses having perfectly dull conversations. After all of these misadventures to occupy my time, I spend most of my money seeing movies, getting mani-and-pedicures, and watching unhealthy amounts of reality TV. I need a change, badly.
I spend a lot of time on the internet now, catching up with old high school and college friends, and what has become a terrible habit of mine is reading through the copious amounts of spam e-mails. Something about the irony of someone asking if I want a bigger penis always brings a smile to my face. There is also an odd poetic sense to all of these e-mails, the poor grammar, the utter frankness of what they want from you; it’s beautiful and refreshing. So, one day I’m going through my spam and I find a subject line that reads, “THE IMF HAS APPROVED YOUR ATM CARD FOR DELIVERY (FBI)”. I’m positively brimming with excitement as this is the first Nigerian e-mail I’ve gotten, and I wait a long time before opening it. I want to relish in the utter bullshitness of it, the long inelegant prose, the bad grammar, and the transparency. When reading it my first thought is that the FBI doesn’t use Comic Sans. That is their first mistake. The FBI wouldn’t be so garish. The e-mail is everything I could ever dream of, typos, bad grammar and syntax, but the best part is it lacked any coherent goal. After reading it, I didn’t quite understand how it is suppose to bilk me out of my money, but I knew that’s the goal because why would they send me it otherwise. Then of course, there is the reason why I’m getting so much money because I’ve fell prey to the gamut of Nigerian e-mail scams and they FBI is trying to make up for that. The best touch is that the sender is claiming to be the personal secretary of FBI director, Robert S.Mueller III. The sender is hoping no one does a google search to plow through the simple ruse. I laugh, and print out the e-mail as I get ready to get a Blizzard from Dairy Queen with nine different toppings, an indulgence of mine recently.
While eating my Blizzard, I read over the e-mail again studying it. As my spoon hits the bottom of the cup, I decide to devise a plan. I start by writing my own Nigerian e-mail deciding to go with a mix of National Lottery and imprisoned Nigerian important personage. My e-mails are pain staking crafted to seem shoddy, but believable, enough to illicit interest from the gullible and sympathetic. After I have my e-mail perfect, I take a trip around New Jersey hitting up local libraries creating fake e-mail accounts to send out my scam e-mails without arousing suspicion from my own IP address. By the time I finish my state-trotting, naireign419 is born, ready to swindle money out of the lazy and stupid.
With both e-mail and e-mail accounts ready to go, I spend time figuring out exactly who to scam. I guess what will be different between me and Nigerian scammers are that I won’t prey on random strangers. I suppose I’m worse because the only people I have access to are the group of housewives who trust me and put me in their mailing loop so I could get e-mails to remind me of a charity event or upcoming party. The beauty of parting them with their substantial allowance is that they will never tell their husbands they fell for a Nigerian e-mail scam out of fear their husbands will think they’re gullible twists. I don’t feel too bad about it because all it will mean is they can’t go to the tanning booth for a month or buy more dresses than they actually need.
Now that my victims have been chosen, it is time to send out the e-mails and wait for the money to roll into my offshore bank account. I string each of them along hoping to keep them on the line for as long as I can, and then I break the line letting them back to the sea stripped of their scales. The real shitty thing I did to them as part of my exit from New Jersey is sending an e-mail claiming to be the personal secretary of FBI Director Robert S.Mueller III saying that they caught the scammer, naireign419. Also, that they have ATM cards with the money they are due waiting to be dispensed once they pay the taxes on them, and prompting them with instructions to send the money to an account. My account.
