Things like spam can be more useful than you think

Seventh-grade me was tasked with writing an article about the the theme ‘perspective’ for his school magazine. Naturally, he found a way to fit the topic to something tech-related. Today, I don’t agree with most of the article which resulted - its style or its message - but I’ve put it here anyways.

You open your email; switch to another tab while the page loads, and when it does, you vehemently open it since you saw the ‘1 unread email’ in the title bar; only to apprehend that what had caused you excitement in anticipation of an email of paramount importance, was only a nugatory communication from a person best described as galling and random. If that sentence left you bewildered, fear not. That feeling of bemusement is similar to what we all feel when we see such emails. Most of us tend to go with the first of the two and fail to give later thought to it. We then comb our email inbox’s app marketplace in search of a tool which, by means best described as magic to us lower beings, manages to deftly categorise all incoming communications and sort them into our spam. Yet from the outlook (pun intended) of people such as James Veitch, a humorous tech comedian who is known for his interactions with spammers, these mails offer the potential for matter for his next show, for his next hilarious talk (which I have happened to watch times uncountable, which never gets old). These talks collectively have millions of views on YouTube and are what can be majorly attributed for skyrocketing Veitch to fame. I greatly sympathise for the spammers who were unlucky enough to be subjected to Veitch’s torturous and excruciating replies, up till the point where one of them begged for respite from emails from him.

My point is that a small change of our perspective in the treating of seemingly insignificant parts of our day-to-day lives could, in fact, transform them, opening up various unprecedented possibilities for doing things that we never knew we could enjoy.

And all this, thanks to a small change in perspective.