Is this statement entirely true? I know it can be argued. Hell, if I stood up in the Denny’s and said, “The sky is blue,” there would be at least one Professor of Pontification stand to correct me with, “The sky itself isn’t any color, it’s the molecules in the air refracting light from the sun, so no, the sky isn’t blue.” And then I would shove an omelet in their face, poke my own eyes out with a fork, and walk (or stumble, because of the eye thing) off into the woods.
I’m kidding. I totally wouldn’t poke my own eyes out — that would hurt.
I pose the question after receiving a message last week, one of the many I’m fortunate to get from people who read and follow along, about things they’d like to see me do posts on. I get a lot of gripe-y stuff, and that’s OK because I’m kind of gripe-y and understand that you reap what you sow sometimes. I most enjoy the awesome people stories, and try to follow up on them as much as possible.
This particular message was kind of gripe-y, about a website selling information that’s available for free on the internet. That kind of stuff isn’t so awful. I myself have paid for information I know I could get for free, but I do it because it’s vetted and easy. When I responded, the sender said they understood, and that wasn’t the issue here. The information the site was selling wasn’t statistical data at all. It was just a bunch of made-up graphs with vague references to trucking publications. I went to look at the website, and when it opened it, my first thought was, “This is a joke.” My second thought was, “I can’t read it because there are so many grammatical errors, my head will explode.” Last thought before closing it, “If anyone actually paid money to this site, they deserve to be had.”
These are tahcosI had a nice messenger conversation with my new friend who sent the original post, and we agreed it was so blatantly bad, it was either a phish for credit card numbers, or a joke. Long story short, too late, but anyway, the site has been taken down. Not because of any of our efforts, but because things like this pop up all over the internet for a few days at a time, and unfortunately, people give them a credit card or Paypal access and they lose their ever-loving hides to scammers. It happens every single day.
There are still plenty of snake oil salesmen out there, they just use the internet instead of traveling show wagons to spread their message. This particular site was pretty easy to spot, it was obviously translated poorly, from another language. Grammar is important, whether or not people place a high value on it.
In this instance, you get what you pay for, which is likely scammed and broke by next Thursday. Cue the Professor of Pontification inside my head, who has to stand up and say, “The very best taco I ever had in my life came from a beat-up lunchbox with a spray painted piece of plywood sign that read, ‘Tahcos 3/5.00,’ so I refute your assertion that grammar indicates quality.”
(Of course, the Professor leaves out the part where I had also been without hot food for about three days, and was hungry enough to eat the skin off a cooked rat, so my senses may have been a little heightened. You see why the Professor and I never get anything done?)
I’m fairly certain there was a point to all this before we got to cooked rat, but I’ve lost it somewhere in the translation… Oh yeah, translation. Bad websites. Scammers. They’re out there, and if you see them pass the information along or report it.
