MESSAGES FROM BEYOND

Sometimes you receive a piece of correspondence that is so baffling that you can do literally nothing with it. You sit with it in a pending tray for weeks, taking it out every now and then, dusting it down, reading and re-reading it, and putting it back until the next time. Eventually, after a number of weeks in which the pile in the pending tray begins to resemble the original manuscript of War and Peace, you throw it in the bin. Or in this case, you use it as a light-hearted piece in an obscure blog. I received an e-mail from a mysterious organisation called Worldsatcom on 1 July and I have been sitting looking at the e-mail infrequently since. It is not a typical e-mail. For one thing, I can’t tell from whence it emanates. For another, under the Worldsatcom logo, there is a photograph of a mobile phone sitting on what looks like the barrel of a shotgun, a piece of imagery too bizarre to contemplate. The text is equally unreal. It reads:

Dear Mr. Hardwick. Dear Ladies and Gentleman. Because of the short Time, wasn’t possible to inform earlier Our INTERESTING PARTNER – The DeKa – to contact You. The DeKa will contact You (Mr. Roland Hauch) to see under which ways a partecipation OFFER can be ISSUED. Yours sincerely, WORLDSATCOM.

I'm nervous at the thought of meeting such a great dignitary as the DeKa himself, and Mr Roland Hauch as well, if it comes to that, unless the latter is in fact my good self, the writer having had yet another valiant stab at my name. I am not sure I especially want to be party to the particepation OFFER either, so I think I’ll respectfully decline Worldsatcom’s request, whatever that is. The problem is, I can’t e-mail back, because I don’t think they can receive electronic messages in the Gamma Quadrant, though they can obviously send them.