The bad Sherpa

I don’t know about you, but I receive hundreds of junky marketing emails a day. Periodically, when the volume of traffic gets too much I take half an hour out of my day to blitz some unsubscribe buttons.

If they are lucky, emails from the same source continue to slip through the net to reach me hundreds, maybe thousands of times before they are culled for good depending on the day it happens and how long I have.

I read recently that even emails have a carbon footprint, which made me feel guilty for ending up on so many unnecessary junk mailing lists. Nothing is planet friendly these days.

Someone gave me a little hardback book for Christmas about how I can make lots of small individual changes to lead a greener lifestyle. Nothing on climate change neutral IT solutions so far though. Maybe I should compost the book once I finish reading it, or something.

I find it increasingly hard to know if I make optimum green decisions e.g which is better in a coffee shop? Buying a manufactured plastic-clad reusable cup made in China for the coffee shop to fill and me to wash at home VS sitting in, using their crockery and therefore facilitating an industrial unit to consume commercial heat/AC/electricity and dishwasher power. The mind boggles!

Anyway, I digress. What I wanted to talk about today is my favourite junk mail sender whom for this blog’s purpose I shall call: the bad Sherpa.

Sherpa sends me emails every day like clockwork with subject fields like, “want to improve your immune system?….then avoid vitamin C”, “feeling depressed?….then don’t go outside” and “want to avoid having a prolapse?…then avoid pelvic floor workouts”

I vaguely remember signing up to the mailing list after showing some interest in something sensible-ish that I thought they were saying about the benefits of intermittent fasting and eradication of diabetes. Now I wonder if they were actually saying “want diabetes?….then don’t try losing weight.”

I know the emails are probably drafted either automatically or by some poor person typing up 1000 a day for a dollar on People per Hour, but it is either hilarious or scary that something so ridiculous is pumped out with an actual thought out article in the mail’s body about why Sherpa knows best.

One thing I really like about the bad Sherpa’s terrible lifestyle advice is that there aren’t even any dodgy links to click in the email, which makes it feel like an utterly pointless endeavour. Unless it is a passion…

I like to imagine some evil mastermind churning his emails out as part of some belief that they are not only contributing to the death of the planet in carbon but also maiming humans with quite literally the opposite of the correct basic health advice.

Or am I his one subscriber? Shudder. Most people surely have a lower tolerance for bullshit junk emails?

The bad Sherpa has in fact avoided the wrath of my cull for months because I thoroughly enjoy receiving the emails everyday.

They are unwittingly very funny and I genuinely look forward to seeing what crock he comes up with next. It honestly must take some thinking to come up with so much antithesis day after day!

So in the midst of this CoVid nonsense. I wanted to take a moment of gratitude to pay tribute to the perverse pleasure of the bad Sherpa’s hilarious emails. The best junk email subs list ever. Cheering me up no end since March 2020!

How about you? Have you managed to find the light in unexpected places lately?