Dog Eat Dog

I am sure that everyone who reads this occasionally gets spam e-mails, so I'll just assume you're familiar enough with them to know that there are tons of opportunities for you to view pornography, buy black-market erectile dysfunction medication, and receive large sums of money from international diplomats who are having trouble with wire transfers. This one, however, takes the cake:

Hello my friend!

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here (link removed) are bad.

Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..

My dog and I are still alive :)

I'm going to invite you to look over that again, so that you can fully appreciate it. I can't fully realize the message's intent, as I never visited the given link, but let's just assume it's your standard phishing scam. I decided that, for kicks, I'd write a response:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am responding to your recent e-mail, which is attached. I feel that I may be able to assist your future writing endeavors by analyzing your message line-by-line.

Line 1: "Hello, my friend?" Given that I have no idea whatsoever who this is coming from, it's hardly feasible that I consider you my friend. This is the anonymous politeness I've come to expect only from foreign people not yet poisoned by American culture, like the stereotypical foreign cab driver during his first week of employment.

Line 2: I've already established that not only are you not my friend, but I don't even know you. With this in mind, threatening to kill yourself isn't going to prompt too much of a response from me. However, since we're both common human beings - and I'm making an assumption regarding your status here - I would be more than happy to execute a small bit of research and refer you to a suicide/crisis hotline. Examining sentence structure, by the way, you should also probably threaten to eat your dog before you threaten to kill yourself, as the latter is a seemingly more drastic action and should be saved until the end of the list of things you're willing to do. Also, you can't eat your dog after you've killed yourself, so it's just awkward from a standpoint of temporal organization. Now then, given your lack of identification and use of ineffective threats, I refuse to visit that link. I'm not exactly sure why a misprinted price for medication would drive you to such a state of distress, but I'm sure that it wouldn't take too much effort on your part to confirm or deny the listed price.

Line 3: Now you're just butchering the English language, as there are no less than five errors in this sentence. We've already established that you're in a rather high state of distress, so I will overlook and forgive the fact that you completely forgot to include your complete telephone number. However, by now you've already established that you have both a working internet connection and a telephone, so there is no reason why I should perform what is clearly your task of double-checking the prices of whatever pills, ointments, or other treatments you feel like ordering from the aforementioned medical website.

Line 4: I had already assumed that you and your dog are both alive, since (a) your previous threats would have been useless otherwise, and (b) you've still enough life in you to send me this e-mail. Granted, this latter evidence reveals nothing about the status of your dog. However, I'm not sure what you mean to convey with that final smiling emoticon. Either you are truly content and therefore can't possibly be on the brink of following through with a double-suicide pact with your dog, or you're simply lying to me, attempting some sort of poignant, irony-laden poetic statement to conclude your desperate cry for help. I'm not inclined to believe either, and I refuse to help you or your dog.

That is, unless you wire a large sum of money into my bank account, like so many incompetent international diplomats before you.