Although we’re somewhat loathe to admit it, there does seem to be the occasional benefit to a Worm – one of those pain in the arse self-replicating email things that steal Outlook address books and such and send out malicious code to all of your friends.
A friend of ours, Jenny Lancashire (name and gender changed for legal reasons), recently discovered that her PC (not a Mac, obviously) was infected with a worm. However, it was only when she started getting complaining messages from (ex)friends and (ex)colleagues and (ex)family members – people in her address book, in fact, that the problem came to light.
There was one message of complaint that was quite welcome though. It was from a long-lost friend who hadn’t been in touch for many years. The worm gave them an excuse to contact their old friend Jenny without the embarassment of years gone by and the two have now arranged to meet again and catch up on all the gossip.
Everyone say, “Aaaaah”. Who needs “reunitedfriends.com” when all you need’s a worm?
That aside the proliferation of these annoying little memes relies on users persisting with the likes of Microsoft Outlook when a non-susceptible email client would be a much better choice.