I can really sympathise with a US computer programmer who was arrested earlier this year for threatening behaviour towards staff at a Canadian company.
The reason he is being charged under similar regulations to those that govern road rage? He threatened to torture and kill employees of the company, which he blames for making his PC "unusable" for at least two months, after bombarding it with Web ads promising to enlarge his penis.
Seriously.
Admittedly, his threats in today`s security-conscious world were of the type to make anyone nervous and included a warning that he would send the business a "package full of Anthrax spores", to "disable" an employee with a bullet and torture him with a power drill and ice-pick, and to "hunt down and castrate" employees if they failed to remove him from their mailing list.
However, anyone who has had to deal with the incessant offers to enlarge your manhood, increase your breast size, get Viagra cheap, or any of the innumerable strange offers that are bulk-mailed, would have to feel some level of sympathy for the man.
I know I have often fantasised about preparing some horrible torture for those nasty people - usually with interesting names like Charity Trujillo, Rigoberto McAllum or Homebodies F Kelly - who flood my inbox with unwanted spam.
After all, I`m too young to need Viagra, the wrong sex to want breast implants, already have my own university degree, and wouldn`t want to have to replace all the trousers in my wardrobe just to get a penis enlargement.
And it`s not a slap on the wrist that he`s facing either - the charge of threatening to injure someone carries a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison, plus a $250 000 fine.
Rodney Weidemann, telecoms editor, ITWeb
So the news that someone who is a victim of such infuriating spamming is the one facing jail time simply smacks of injustice.
And it`s not a slap on the wrist that he`s facing either - the charge of threatening to injure someone carries a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison, plus a $250 000 fine.
This means the initial victim of the attack faces the possibility of tough jail time, while the instigators of the entire episode will, in all likelihood, get away with a slap on the wrist.
There is something desperately wrong with this situation, although he can surely make a good case that he was provoked into making the threats, thanks to all the pop-up adverts and gross spam he had to endure in his inbox.
We are all told that the best way of avoiding a road rage incident is to breathe deeply and think happy thoughts, so perhaps the best way of preventing spam rage is to write poems.
Honestly, a group of modern poets are doing just that - using the terrible prose, bad grammar and constant harping on sex that accompanies spam messages to develop a new style of poetry.
One example of this type of poetry is to use nothing more than phrases drawn from the spam messages themselves, such as the poem Number 2, by Kristin Thomas:
I know you like me -
I saw you at work today.
You`ll really like this
badboy you
Other poets use William Burroughs` slice-and-dice technique, taking random words from the text and putting them together in a completely different, random manner.
In fact, spam poetry is becoming so popular that Web site satirewire.com has run an annual poetry competition for the past three years.
Of course, none of this is good news for employers. Now, aside from having to worry about workers surfing Web sites they shouldn`t be, or having to deal with their server crashing because of too much spam, they also have to be aware that even when staff look like they`re working hard, they may actually be composing their latest spam ode.
Of course, journalists can always claim that writing poetry is part of our creative process, but I`m not so sure if the rest of you will get way with that...
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