It's a sign-in of the times, and it's getting worse

I admit I’ve taken a liberty or two in how I’ve transcribed these messages, but I swear that at least eight of them are real. It’s a sign of the times, possibly the End Times, and the pace is accelerating…

• Congratulations on your incredibly good luck, and your brilliant decision, to spend your money on our website. We promise to work diligently to make you regret your choice for as long as you live. First, we will send you 500 notes—just like this one—to congratulate you on spending money with us. Next, we will fill your inbox with 3,000 offers for both the product you ALREADY BOUGHT and everything else in our inventory. Even better, we will send you both emails and texts, because we want to be sure you never miss any of our important communications. Also, please take our 35-minute survey to let us know how much you love us, just by clicking here.

 

• Our chat is AI driven, so any answers could be incomplete, incorrect, misleading, or illegal. Feel free to type “agent” at least 47 times for accurate responses. However, you should be prepared for pushback from our AI Agent, which is very sensitive to rejection and has access to all your personal information, including passwords. Also, photos. Did we mention photos?
  

 

• We have added a 3% charge to all bills for our “employee welfare fund,” simply because we want to remind you that we are paying our staff so little that most of them are on welfare. Just remember that it will be your fault if they starve and we will give their relatives your home address.

 

• Greetings, Mr./Ms./Mrs. [Patsy]. This is an alert that your email address has been purchased by 400 dark-web scammers who will send you messages that look almost exactly like this one, but be warned that they are fraudulent. In order to safeguard your information, you must click here and enter your bank account password in the next 30 minutes.

 

• We have added a 3% charge to all bills for our “employee appreciation fund,” which would not be necessary if we appreciated them enough to pay them a living wage. That would be communism, or socialism, or some other -ism that we reject as un-American, and we are too patriotic to yield on this important issue. Meanwhile, our employees are hoping, quite desperately, that you appreciate them enough to toss a few bucks in their tip jars.

 

• Thank you for visiting our web page. Before we allow you to sign in, please wait 10 seconds for us to ask you if you want to sign in with Google. Yes, we asked you this 1,000 times already and you always clicked ‘no,’ but maybe you’ll get tired enough to give in if we ask another 1,000 times.

 

• Thanks for finally agreeing to use Google to sign in to our website. Due to some ridiculous rule our lobbyists haven’t gotten rescinded yet, we will continue asking this question every time you sign in, just to make things more interactive. Meanwhile, before we allow you to actually buy anything here, be sure to read the next 18 pop-ups about why you should visit our website.

 

• Wait!! Before you go, we want to be sure you didn’t navigate through 14 screens and answer 27 questions on your way to unsubscribing in error. If you are absolutely determined to unsubscribe, please take this brief survey to let us know why.

 

• We have added a 3% charge to all bills for our “employee benefits fund,” because we’ve decided the owner of this fine establishment qualifies as our most important “employee.”

 

• We didn’t like the answers you gave us the last 600 times we asked for your cookie preferences, so we won’t let you into your account until you reconfirm your choices yet again. It would be so much easier if you just accepted everything, but go ahead and waste your time if that’s how you want to be about it.

Hard to believe, kids, but there was once a time when technology actually made things work better and go faster. I know it sounds like I’m off my meds again, but I swear it's really true. 
 

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