It was not a pretty sight in Chicago on Thursday evening. The heavy snow started falling mid-afternoon, so it was timed perfectly to create havoc for nearly all modes of transportation. I’m pretty much a public transit guy out of necessity, whereas my wife has a job in the northern suburbs and drives every day. We were both in for some ugly commuting. My bus ride home started around 4PM, and it took 2.5 hours to get home, for what amounted to less than 7 miles. My wife had it worse - her commute distance is roughly 18 miles, and she clocked in at approximately 3 hours, 45 minutes.

As we were commiserating over a hastily assembled dinner of soup and sandwiches, my business line rang. It was 9:30PM. I made no attempt to get up and answer it. Then I heard my BlackBerry skitter across the coffee table in the living room. I groaned out loud. I only have a handful of customers that are that obsessive-compulsive to call both my work and cell numbers one after another (after hours in a blizzard, no less). I chuckled that they were probably going to ask me if I could tend to their problem right away in the middle of the snowstorm.

After I finished my dinner, I figured I should at least see who it was that called. I had my money on one customer in particular… so I was shocked when the call log and corresponding voicemail proved me wrong. They didn’t leave much detail about what they needed, but they were former neighbors, so I called them back right away.

The basic question they had for me was could they recall an e-mail they sent in error. But why the panicked call at 9:30PM in the middle of a snow storm? Let me put the issue in some context, and see if you can find the same humor in it that I did. This customer works as a financial advisor. Like many of us, he’d gotten his share of the classic “Nigerian Scam” e-mails. You know the one, with the overtly wordy and polite language, laced with official sounding terms and a distinct tone that implied English is a second language to the author. I’ve only gotten it a handful of times, but my customer gets it on a regular basis. But rather than deleting it, he took personal affront to the scam and would fire back some, ahem, tersely worded responses telling the sender where he could stick his “top secret transaction.” That action in itself is problematic. To a scammer or spammer, any response means they have a “live one” on the other end of the send button.

Now here’s the kicker. This happened so regularly that when a similarly worded e-mail showed up Thursday, rather than reading it closely, he immediately fired off an “F.U.” response. Naturally, it was only after he hit the send button that he read the original message again. It was only then he realized that it wasn’t another Nigerian scam message, but a oddly worded e-mail from a prospective customer that had talked with him in person about investing earlier in the week. He read me a few lines from the message, and it had some similar traits to the scam messages, so I could somewhat see how he made the mistake.

Sadly, I had to inform him that POP3 mail on the Internet doesn’t allow senders to recall e-mails once they’ve left their server of origin. Clearly, he would have to send a follow-up “mea culpa” message and hope for the best. I told him that in the future, he should never respond to spam or scam e-mails, and just delete them instead. By the end of the conversation, we shared a good laugh about what had transpired and I told him to let me know what happened when he heard back from his prospective client.

Tags: nigerian scam, blizzard, computer repair, email oops, chicago