The Clock Has Come a Full Circle

I am no tiger in the woods. Forget tigers, I am not even a coyote in the woods! Yet, what exactly were the Internet sharks thinking when they stole my non-descript website url uspandey.com a year back? That I’d be running to them with two rucksacks of gold, one in each arm? Maybe Tiger Woods would do that if it saves his marriage. Certainly not me for a string of symbols, or worse still, for a string of zeroes and ones!

But the Internet is deeper than you think and the potent mafia is closer to you than you can imagine. Just to give you an idea, and sorry if you feel uncomfortable, every fetch and send to your bank account rubs shoulders with an infinity of cookies, trojans, worms and malwares. What I am driving at is that it didn’t take them long to figure I am broke and that, I probably will have to sell my kidneys to buy a decent pair of Nikkor lenses for my DSLR that I’ve been pining for! And they dumped me on the beach with the rest of the silt and probably carried a prize catch or two away. I, of course, mean the website url by ‘me’.

No, it doesn’t end there. The Net is bristling with smalltime crooks and fraudsters of every imaginable hue. I specially love the kinds who disclose how you just won a lottery of $1,000,000,000 and how a bunch of shameless customs officials are holding the booty for a mere $1! They take over where the Sharks quit.

So I get this mail from best-domains-on-earth or some bullshit.com telling me they will be selling my favourite domain in an auction soon. However, they say, if I pay certain $$$s it would be mine again. Déjà vu. I almost hit the delete button when I notice it is not the same outfit from down under which approached me the last winter. You know what, curiosity killed the cat! So instead of brushing it off but thinking about it the entire week, I did a ‘whois’ for the lost url. Surprisingly, it was lying there, as I said, dumped on the beach with the rest of the silt, unregistered with anyone. This cat wanted a ransom for the fish he never was in possession of! Before I realized, my fingers had fished out that nemesis of my life, a.k.a. the credit card, from my pocket and I had booked the domain again for a mere $5! I am hard put to put it to some use but at least it will not be misused or hawked around the stinking alleys of Internet. The clock, of course, has come a full circle.