My favourite messages of the last 24 hours - my goodness, they could really make you rich
Those of you who cherish the out-pourings of the shit-for-brains creeps who infest cyberspace will like this.
I think perhaps the most illiterate attempt ever to rip me off came half an hour ago.
Even in its over-exploited genre it had a peculiar charm of its very own, right down to the esoteric spelling of a good old Scots name:
A message from Mcmilan Marshall mcmilan8282
I am Mr Mcmilan Marshall, Retired Marine Director here in London , England .However, I have already sent you this same letter by post a one month ago, but I am not sure that the letter promptly gets to you since I have not heard from you, now I am resending it again. I want to trust this investment fund in your care, It will be in my interest to transfer this fund worth of ? £6.5M Great British Pounds(Six Million Five hundred thousand Pounds Sterling) in an account offshore. Can you be my partner? Regards and respect, please kindly send me your Cell phone number, And tell me your opinion.
Mr. Marshal.
What is a Marine Director, by the way?
It wrote telling me that he (Dylan, I assume) "Wanted to see if you had any interest talking about Keith's Relationship Masters Academy."
Who is Keith, you may ask? Well, he is Keith Ferrazzi, has a big smile, knows a lot of clichés, has done a deal with Cisco and persuaded them his Academy can really change your life.
It seems:
Research has proven that the strength and breadth of your Human Network is the most predictive element of your personal and professional success. And the more authentic your relationships the better! Keith Ferrazzi, thought leader and co-founder of the Relationship Masters Academy will guide you through seven simple but extremely valuable and effective missions that will allow you to purposefully build new relationships and skillfully strengthen and manage the ones you already have for immediate results.
Well, how about that? Or as you might say, what pretentious tripe.
Lee Iacocca who once rescued Chrysler put it rather better when he said "If you want to succeed you'd better get on with people, because that's all we've got around here."
And Dale Carnegie's How to make friends and influence people tells you what to do in plain English rather than corporate gobbledegook.
Anyhow, Dylan is West Coast head of sales for Keith's Academy, but his auto-responder or whichever airhead writes its stuff clearly doesn't know England has not actually been on the West Coast for as far back as I can remember. So undeterred he wrote yesterday in a chummy sort of way saying,
Hey Drayton, Wanted to see if you had any interest talking about Keith's Relationship Masters Academy. All the best. Dylan Dylan Conroy|RelationshipMastersAcademy.com Head of West Coast Sales 323-420-6250 dconroy@ferrazzigreenlight.com
I wrote back one word: Why?
His auto-responder replied in semi-literate fashion saying: Trying to remember the providence (I assume he means provenance) of our introduction. I think it was Bob Sering?
I replied "His name is Bob Serling. If you can't spell it, I really doubt if we can do any business."
I ask you, what is the matter with people's education and commonsense if they fall for this stuff? And how does a man get to be head of sales of anything if he can't write English?
More to the point, what is Cisco doing in business with these people?
By the way, for those of you who have asked - there are quite a few - yes, we are filming the branding event, and I will be whizzing out a clip of Rory Sutherland and myself talking in the tiny Fellows' Study at the Royal Society for Arts about the subject later.
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