Warrior Cat and the Yoohooo Spam Filter
"That is unjust!" the Warrior cat shouted, leaping up and raising his sword high. The light from the Tiffany chandelier gleamed along its edge.
"Yeah," Chris Hugh said. "Life is so unfair to me. All my mail is getting caught in people's spam folders and no one is seeing it."
Warrior Cat jumped down from Chris' round waterbed with its silk sheets and fur bedspread and landed on the custom floor inlaid with the rarest woods from endangered rain forests. "Who is responsible for this enormity?"
Chris shrugged, swallowing a mouthful of foie gras and tossing the rest in a wastebasket made from an elephant's leg. "I think it's Yahoo. It seems like they've flagged my email address."
"I will right this wrong!" Warrior Cat cried. "I will make them unhand your email!" And with that, the cat disappeared, magically travelling along Chris' super-premium T-1 modem link and traversing the electronic pathways between Chris' mansion and Yahoo's headquarters.
He emerged in a huge server room amid row upon row of huge computers. He logged into a terminal and nosed around.
"Hmm," he said, examining the list of spam addresses. "Poor Chris was blacklisted simply for sending eight million helpful messages to potential customers last week. That's wrong! Chris is only earning a living." He clicked the mouse down and started erasing the address, but
Author_of_Really_Grate_Riting_I_Spell_Good_Too @ yoohooo
was very long and it was hard to concentrate his feline attention on clicking the delete key so many times. He got it down to Author @ yoohooo then he sat on the keyboard and groomed himself, accidentally changing Author to Arthur and somehow adding a wildcard key that insured that every address containing that name would be blocked as spam. Then he chased a stray rubber band around the server room before going home.
The next day, 297 Arthurs around the country were confused when their friends stopped returning their messages. Fifteen Arthurs ate lunch alone because their friends didn't get their emails inviting them to lunch. Two Arthurs in New York and three in California did not get to interview for jobs they'd been pursuing because five HR people never received replies from them. And one wife in Indiana, already suffering the difficult delivery of her first child, was consumed by worry because her husband in Afghanistan had suddenly stopped writing to her.
On the bright side, each one of them received a special offer to buy Viagra, earn a college degree, meet hot chicks, and buy Chris' book, Diseased Imaginings.
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