I wrote this last year, in part a tribute to singer Steve Goodman’s “Vegamatic” a classic satiric look mass marketing, and in part a reflection on the pandemic that changed so many habits for a time.
The irony, though, is that my Facebook profile was hacked in a ransomware attack, so all this stuff is quite real.
Anyway, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.
“A pandemic Christmas, with elves”
“Marie, honey, did you buy a giant Lego set from Amazon?” He couldn’t disguise the irritation in his voice. Lewis planned, and such interruptions were disruptive.
He stared at the computer message, waiting for Marie’s answer. He could hear his wife shuffling with something in the kitchen.
“Honey?” He raised his voice. Maybe she didn’t hear him. “Weren’t we going to talk to the kids first, you know, before launching into the usual Christmas madness of huge toys?”
Silence, still.
“It’s just that I have a message from UPS saying they had trouble delivering it. Do you remember buying it? We’ve been home all week. Why would they have trouble delivering it?”
Marie slipped into the office with a dish towel over her shoulder and dropped her elbows on Lewis’s head.
“Ow,” he squealed. “Sharp.”
Marie mumbled a few words as she read the message.
“Ah, that’s spam,” she said as she kissed the top of his head. “Look at the return address. Nopolehaha.com? Totally fake. Delete it. Now if you don’t mind I have some chickens to murder for dinner tonight.” She turned away. “And if you can’t lower the stress level in here, I might just have to murder you, too. I get it, the report and all, but, Lewis, squawk, squawk!”
Lewis laughed. “Do it mercifully.”
She was right. The year-end sales report had taken entirely too long. It hadn’t been a bad year, just not as good as top management had predicted. And with the office disruption and people working from home half the time, it was hard to judge the corporate mood. Usually when that happened the talk of layoffs began. Maybe that’s why he took so long to complete it, to delay that possibility, as if each day longer he worked on the report the bad news might become better.
“I’m just the messenger,” he said softly so there was no chance that Marie would hear it. He didn’t want to worry her. “I’m just the messenger,” he repeated. “But sometimes they kill the messenger.”
He closed his eyes, opened them, and leaned back to the desk. “Okay, let’s go.” Trying to cheer himself.
He sipped some iced tea and returned to the report. Last piece of business for the year, some time off, visit the kids in Vermont for Christmas, a couple day’s rest, then back to the grind after New Year’s Day.
He puzzled again at the email message. Our kids are married with kids of their own, he thought, Maybe it was them. Shipment got messed up. “Alright,” he said, “Onward.”
He typed a few more pages. Christmas carols from the kitchen drifted throughout the house.
As he uploaded a chart, the front door camera chimed out a few measures of “Jingle Bells” and Lewis peeked at his phone to see a UPS driver walking away from the porch where she had placed a box.
“I thought they couldn’t deliver it,” Lewis grumbled as he pushed out of his chair. “Marie, did you order something else from somewhere? There’s a box on the porch.”
It was three boxes. Each was bound with red-and-white candy cane tape and a green-and-white banner that yelled, “Thanks for your order!!”
Lewis scratched his head. “What’s all this?” He propped open the storm door with one foot and dropped the boxes in the corner by the book shelf. “Don’t have time for this,” he muttered as he glanced as his watch.
He examined the labels and discovered all three had different return addresses and emails. He snapped photos with his phone.
Returns are usually 15 days. I’ll call after I finish the report and arrange pick-up tomorrow.
The kitchen was a warm with the mellow aroma of roasting, marinated chicken.
Marie entered and pointed to the living room. “There’s …”
“More packages…” Lewis completed her sentence. “It’s too much. The odd messages and invoices. I think we’ve been hacked.”
Marie offered as raised-eyebrow head shake.
“How long till dinner?”
“Hour. About 6:30.”
“Smells good,” Lewis said. “The report’s nearly ready to file. I’ll run a scan before dinner. Maybe it’s a Trojan horse or some malware. Clean it out. Where’s your laptop? I’ll scan it as well.”
Marie retrieved her computer from the bedroom.
“What a time of year to have this happen,” she said. “All that online shopping, all those orders, all those credit cards.”
“Yeah, everybody in a hurry. All it takes is one mistake and your whole financial world is open for examination. Always wondered what evil genius is behind it all. Maybe some Santa elf gone rogue.” He patted the computer. “I’m ready for them.”
“My hero,” Marie extravagantly swooned, eyes aflutter.
Lewis set Marie’s computer on the chair near his desk, started the scan and turned to his own.
He ran several types of analyses on the report, fiddled with the charts so they were easier to read, checked the text to ensure the highlighted hyper links to other company divisions worked, added a signature and sent the file to the company treasurer and chief executive officer.
The scan on Marie’s laptop had blasted through 270,000 files and reported no problems.
While sending the email with the report he noticed a new troubling message about an “approved purchase” from a large online merchant. The message alerted him to his apparent successful purchase of five kid-sized motorized toy Ram pick-up trucks.
Lewis recognized the item immediately as a “spoofing file,” an invoice created by hackers that uses the logos of real companies to inform unsuspecting customers of a large purchase.
Lewis smiled. “Gotcha.” And he open a desktop file marked “scam files,” selected an address, and forwarded the offending message to the security division of the actual company.
When he opened the file to check the virus scan, a sound leaked from the speaker. Lewis looked away and then back. Naw, he thought, computers don’t giggle.
****
The next morning Lewis found Marie opening the packages that had arrived the day before.
Beside her was a pile of baby clothes, another of children’s books, crayons, video games and assorted items intended as Christmas presents.
“What are you doing? We need to send this stuff back, not open it.” He scanned the boxes. “Wait, what’s this? Veg-O-Matic?”
“Yeah, it’s like a food processor.”
Lewis laughed. “Well, give that one away.” He knelt to gather up the goods and stuff them back in their boxes.
Marie reached for his hands and held them till he dropped the baby clothes.
“Honey, have some coffee and sit down. There is no place to send these things back to. Did you read the return email addresses? rednosedelivery.com? ondancerexpress.com? And my favorite, makingthelist.com.”
Lewis, eyes wide, wiped his forehead. “But…they charged us for all this. How did we get it? The cost…we’ll never get the money back.”
“I checked our credit cards, Lewis. There are no transactions.”
He scowled. “So it’s a joke. Who do we know…?”
Marie laughed. “But what a joke. We need to donate all this stuff as fast as we can, just in case it’s a mistake. I’ve already made a list of charities.”
“Some mistake.” Lewis wasn’t laughing.
“Come on, get over it. I doubt makingthelist.com is going to send out a squad of little armed Santas for this stuff.”
“Why?”
“Because it doesn’t exist. I’ve been searching the Internet all morning. None of these sites exist.”
Her enthusiasm won him over. “You’re right. No one is going to harass us over a few boxes of misdelivered toys. Happens all the time.”
Marie bit her lip and nodded toward the front yard.
“Not just a few.”
Lewis stepped to the front door, face puzzled and looked back at Marie before he opened the door.
“Holy smokes!”
Marie joined him, “There’s twenty.”
“Oh, Marie, that’s going to take…”
“Lewis, those are going to be easy. The ones in the side yard are going to be a little tougher.”
He stepped around one of the piles on the porch to see five large wooden crates in the yard marked, “Handle with care. HEAVY.”
He leaned against the pile of boxes, suddenly light, the pressing concerns of the past few days – the report, the deadlines, holiday shopping, planning the Vermont trip, what to get Marie after last year’s disastrous excursion into exercise equipment – gone.
He reached to hold her and laughed.
His phone rang with the sound of children giggling.
Staring back at him was an avatar of two smiling and waving elves and the logo: Zeke and Noel Productions. A division of nopolehaha.com.
