A week ago, many of you received a weird message from me. It wasn’t my fault, obviously. It was not the error of my web guru, the woman who built my website. Her name is Katrina Glover, The Woman Who Knows Everything About Websites and Email Marketing. It was the mistake of an Email Service which shall remain nameless because Katrina says they are still the best service, regardless of their mistake. Here’s what happened.
One Tuesday morning, before I was out of bed, the first thing out of my husband’s mouth was, “You’ve been hacked.” Someone had posted a piece about armadillos under my name.
“Is the hacker a good writer so I can take credit for it?” I mumbled into my pillow.
“See what you think,” said the husband.
I yawned and skimmed the post.
I realized it was something I had written about armadillos in 2020. I had not reposted the piece. But someone did. You, dear reader, may have received the post about armadillos, or you may have received a reader’s comment on the armadillo post. Some of you said when you tried to open the post, it disappeared. This all sounds like the work of an internet-savvy armadillo to me. He found my piece and wanted it to have the attention it deserved.
Katrina, the website guru, investigated. She was not convinced an armadillo was responsible. She contacted The Email Service and told them they had made several mistakes:
- The Email Service picked the post randomly. It was very old. I wrote it five years ago. In technology years, that’s a long time ago. Earth had revolved around the sun five times since I originally published the armadillo post. The Earth’s revolution around the sun carries it 580 million miles in a year. So all of Earth’s armadillos had circled the sun, traveling 2,900,000,000 miles since I published the post. In armadillo years, it was an ancient writing. I’m sure the armadillo thought I wrote it on papyrus.
- The Email Service sent the post at the ungodly hour of 7:30 a.m., even though Katrina had set my posts to go out at 9 a.m. The Holy Spirit says 9 a.m. is a much more godly hour. The Spirit is awake at 7:30 Eastern but only for emergencies.
- What arrived in inboxes was not even a post. It was a comment on a post. That’s crazy.
But The Email Service said Katrina was the one who had lost her mind. They insisted it was impossible for them to send an old post unless the writer had requested it.
Katrina and The Email Service went back and forth in several emails. She included me in the conversation. They disagreed with each other, but they spoke a common language called RSS Feed. I have never taken a class in RSS Feed, so I didn’t understand half of what they discussed.
It reminded me of sitting in meetings with my CPA husband and our financial advisor. Two sentences in, they start speaking The Language of Finance, and I’m lost. I’d say it’s Greek to me, but I took New Testament Greek, and I still recall the alphabet which I memorized by singing it to the ABC song. “Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, eta, zeta, theta.” The alphabet song is also the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Sing your ABCs from A to P. Now sing Twinkle, Twinkle. Same tune. Mozart wrote the tune, but I don’t think he spoke Greek or RSS Feed. He was a rock star in his time. He could have made so much money on TikTok.
This is off topic, but I must insert here that you can sing the words of “Amazing Grace” to the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song. If you’re old enough to know what “Gilligan’s Island” was, give it a try.
(Those seven stranded castaways packed a lot of stuff for a tour that was supposed to last three hours. All of Ginger’s dresses. All of Mrs. Howell’s hats. What did they eat? Maybe armadillos. Any decent uncharted island has armadillos.)
The Email Service continued to blame the snafu on Katrina or me. But I knew an armadillo had hacked into my site.
Armadillos look like a cross between a pig and a tank. The ears and nose of a pig and the armor of a tank. You can find them in the southern U.S. and all the way down to South America.
They eat insects and are nocturnal, which explains why I encountered one on a Disney property at night fifteen years ago. I was less than a mile from Cinderella’s castle. That’s what happens when you build a theme park in armadillo territory.
They are solitary, and they sleep for extended periods of time. This sounds like me. I like nighttime, and I enjoy sleeping for prolonged periods of time. When I was a toddler, I woke up in my crib in the morning and sang. Other two-year-olds climb out of their cribs and forage in the kitchen. My mother tells me I was content to stay in my crib and sing about family members. At the age of two I said, “For most of my life, I will have to get out of bed by 7:30 in the morning. I am staying in this crib as long as possible.”
I appreciate the armadillo lifestyle. But as for the animal who hacked my site, he should apologize. And Walt Disney should apologize for displacing armadillos to build Disney World. And The Email Service needs better security so armadillos cannot send emails in my name. And while I’m holding forth on which humans and which armor-covered, pig-nosed mammals should apologize, I’ll say this: No one should be required to get up before 7:30 in the morning. But if you insist on being a morning person and you happen to be outside just as the sun comes up, you may run into an armadillo heading home to sleep.
But if you spot an armadillo and he’s using your laptop which he stole from your vehicle, tell him hacking is evil and he should confess to the Holy Spirit. But tell him to wait till 7:30 a.m. The Holy Spirit prefers that everyone sleeps till then.
But feel free to pray if it’s an emergency. If you’re shipwrecked on an uncharted island ruled by armadillos who are wearing Ginger’s dresses and Mrs. Howell’s hats, you should pray. But first heave your laptop into the ocean. No sense in letting an armadillo get close to it.