FailArmy, slick scammers and an update on my pickup truck door adventure
I’m not sure what it says about me, but the most frequent things that show up on my Facebook page are episodes of FailArmy.
These are video clips built around a theme of people doing things that don’t work out, like attempting backflips or dunking basketballs. I don’t know if they think I enjoy watching people do things that could hurt them or they are challenging me to send in something myself. But I know I usually click on and watch at least part of them. I never get tired of watching things fall off forklifts.
It is interesting that while some of the goof-ups are things I have seen before, there are always new ones as well. It seems to be an endless supply of people who have been filmed messing up badly. Bad driving alone fuels an industry.
The next most popular thing I get is something called Weird History. Apparently that is my Facebook profile, fail and weird. Not flattering but it still beats the heck out of those Medicare ads that are everywhere.
Sophisticated scammers
The scammers out there in foreign countries have become a bit more sophisticated. It used to be easy to tell a scam because the language in the messages was crude and full of grammatical mistakes.
No more wealthy Nigerian officials but now I am getting many messages telling me that my purchase of a computer or computer services has been approved. Since these expenditures are for upwards of $1,000, the expectation is the enraged receiver of the message will call to try to straighten it out. Then the operative can try to get financial information to correct the non-existent problem and use it to steal.
They use names like Amazon and Microsoft with official looking invoices to try and lure you in. The temptation to call can be strong and that is what they count on. But try to resist.
One message I received the other day was easy to ignore. It told me my account at a national bank had been locked down because of suspicion of fraud. Indeed there was suspicion of fraud, but I was the suspicious one because I don’t have an account at that bank. That was phishing at its finest.
Pickup truck door update
A few weeks ago I wrote about diving into an adventure of fixing the door in my pickup truck. The driver’s side window had fallen down inside the door and wouldn’t stay up. As cold weather set in, that became a bigger problem.
So I went online to find out all I could about 1999 pickup repair. After a lot of failure I managed to get the window up and working correctly, sort of. But in the process I managed to mess up the mechanism that opens the door so you had to roll down the window to open the door with the outside handle.
Hey, one step at a time, right? Or one step up, one step back maybe. But unfortunately that next step up turned into a giant leap and unlike Neil Armstrong on the moon, I couldn’t make it. As a result, the door didn’t cooperate and locked my wife inside so that she had to crawl awkwardly and painfully out the passenger side.
The truck visited a mechanic for a real fix.