the chicken said Im supposed to help you
I would have written sooner but I’ve been, well, a bit distracted.
What Todd failed to mention in his latest comment is that he was responsible for my being “away for a couple of days”.
It was Tuesday when he said I think I know how to help you.
It was late Wednesday night when I learned what that meant. I opened my email and there were a couple dozen BankBuddy receipts. Small random amounts, on the order of fifteen to twenty dollars. Over the next half hour, another ten or so came in. I had no idea what was going on.
“Todd?” I typed. “Do you know what this is about?” Todd was not around.
By Thursday morning there were almost a hundred BankBuddy receipts in my in-box. Todd was still missing. And I was starting to get emails from individuals. A typical one read something like this:
“Um. Excuse me. Not sure who you are, but I noticed this morning that my BankBuddy account sent you $15.62 last night for a book I didn’t order. The only thing I ordered online in the last week was a copy of The Secret DVD. Could you please check into this?”
If it’s possible to scream into a computer by banging hard on the keyboard, I screamed. “Todd!”
what’s up boss
Todd was back. The sticky was yellow, large and playful,
“Tell me what’s going on.”
Todd told me, with pride, excitement, and a great flourish of detail. I’ll spare you the conversation. Suffice it to say that, after our Tuesday tête-à-tête, Todd had gone off and hacked the system. Online orders for The Secret DVD were intercepted and diverted. Part of the money went to purchase used copies of the various books on my website reading list, which were then sent to the people who thought they were ordering a life-changing feature length documentary. The balance was sent to my account.
In Todd’s view, everybody was a winner. The shoppers would get a great book they probably would never have seen otherwise. The book sellers would get a sale. I would get some cash. Even the people who made The Secret were getting something: a wonderful example of The Law of Attraction at work. You put a scam out into the universe - you attract one right back at you.
The glitch would have been discovered soon enough, of course, as people started getting strange books, as their copies of The Secret failed to materialize. The hack would have been found and fixed. But it would have worked for a while.
If only Todd had remembered to alter people’s BankBuddy accounts. Those accounts led back to me.
“Todd,” I typed, “you can’t do stuff like that. You can’t