There’s a moment when the usual annoyance turns into something nastier. It stops being background noise and starts feeling like a personal vendetta. Relentless. Like someone’s declared war on my time, my patience, my sanity, and every bloody gadget I own. I’m way past being irritated. I’m past the eye-rolls and the polite sighs. I’m under siege. No breaks, no mercy, just a constant barrage.
And the worst part? Monty Python warned us. They tried to tell us. They gave us the blueprint decades ago.
“Have you got anything without spam?”
“Well, there’s spam egg sausage and spam, that’s not got much spam in it.”
“I don’t want ANY spam!”
What used to be a harmless joke is now my daily reality. Lucky me.
In my world, the waitress is Verizon, AT&T, Outlook, and every botnet this side of hell. No matter what I ask for, they just heap more spam on my plate and act like they’re doing me a kindness.
Let’s talk phones, because that’s where the insanity really screams. At work, I get at least twenty-five spam calls before I’ve even had my first cup of tea. My Verizon cell? Twenty more this morning, and that’s just before noon. Every single one is some spoofed number, pretending to be local, pretending to be someone I might actually give a damn about. They’re built to trick you. And sometimes, aye, they do. Sometimes the number looks just familiar enough that you answer before your brain catches up.
And then it hits. That dead pause. The giveaway silence before the robocall system connects you to some chancer in a call center halfway around the globe. That half-second where your brain screams, ‘Not this shite again.’ Then, right on cue, the voice pipes up, always with the same fake cheer: ‘Hello Colin…’
And that’s when the reflex kicks in. The hard shutdown. The verbal eject button. SHUT THE FUCK UP … take me off your fucking list, you useless CUNT! The thing people think is a catchphrase, but is actually a survival mechanism. Because when you’ve been hammered by this garbage day after day, week after week, year after year, you stop entertaining it. You stop being polite. You stop giving them a chance to get a word out. You shut it down instantly because if you don’t, they’ll keep going, and going, and going. It’s not rudeness. It’s self‑defense.
Meanwhile, Verizon, the same lot who sold me the phone, bill me every month, and swear blind their Call Filter is ‘active,’ can’t even get their own app to work on their own bloody network. I spent twenty-eight minutes on the phone with them today. The grand result? ‘We need forty-eight hours to investigate.’ Forty-eight hours to figure out why their own software won’t launch. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
Email’s no better. Between home and work, I’m drowning in over eighty spam emails a day. Gmail actually does its job, but Outlook? Outlook’s like a hall monitor who’s nodded off at his post. The worst rubbish just waltzes in, fake mustache and all. I’ve set up rules, filters, blocklists, safe senders, unsafe senders—you name it. Outlook still lets half the junk through, acting like it’s doing me a favor.
And then there’s the websites. Mine are locked down tighter than a medieval fortress. Firewalls, bot blockers, CAPTCHAs, honeypots, rate limits, blacklists, anti-scraping gadgets—you name it, I’ve thrown it at the wall. Still, the bots get through. It’s like building stone walls, towers, boiling oil, archers, and the enemy just parachutes in anyway. They scrape, they poke, they attack, round the clock. Sometimes I wonder if the folks making the blockers and the folks making the bots are the same people, because the arms race is too perfect. One side patches, the other side levels up. I’m just trying to run a normal site, and the bots treat my forms like a public toilet.
Here’s the ugly truth. Your phone number and email are in more databases than you can count. Those lists get sold, swapped, leaked, scraped. Robocallers use auto-dialers to blast out millions of calls. Spoofing makes them look local. Bots scrape websites for contact forms. Email spam pours in from hacked servers and botnets. Blocking one number is pointless—they just spin up thousands more. The carriers are always playing catch-up. Filters only react, never prevent. Once you’re in, you’re never getting out.
It’s not personal. It’s just volume. Massive, industrial-scale, soul-crushing volume.
So yes, I’m under siege. You’re under siege. Anyone with a phone, email, or website is under siege. Spam calls. Spam emails. Spam bots. Spam texts. Spam bloody everything. And the worst part? We’re just supposed to live with it, like it’s the weather. Like it’s normal. Like it’s fine. Spoiler: it’s not.
Well, I’m done pretending it’s fine. This is my rant. This is my line in the sand. I’m saying it loud and clear: SPAM SPAM SPAM. I don’t want any FUCKING spam.