BEN LOCKED OUT

I got an email from Apple today. Apple customer services, no less.

“Hi Customer, your Apple ID has ben locked...”

I feel sorry for Ben, but I have no real idea how my Apple account could have imprisoned him. Who is he? Where is he? Inside a high-tech basement somewhere in San Diego, waiting for my Apple ID and password, like a trapped member of a team doing The Crystal Maze?

Oh. Don’t panic, Americans. I don’t mean a weird drugs ritual in a posh garden: The Crystal Maze was a show in the UK in which teams of enthusiastic people had to solve puzzles in a locked room before they could get out - like a sort of 90s escape room, but on actual TV, and hosted by an elf in a velvet leopard-skin jacket.

Ben, if you’re reading this, I can’t help you. You’re just going to have to keep shouting for help down there in Apple HQ. Maybe if you can find a button that says ‘force quit’ or something, some blue t-shirted genius will let you out without having to tattoo the logo on your forearm and make you swear allegiance to Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive forever. I suppose they could give you an Apple ID of your own instead; of course a lot of people think that’s pretty much the same thing.

That aside, I hate these phishing emails. Anything at all these days that tells me there’s a ‘problem with’ my ‘account’ gets my hackles up. Even more so if it addresses me as ‘dear customer’ - don’t even know my name? Really phishers? Really? People fall for that?

Well I guess they must do from time to time. I sometimes wonder whether the quest to make life super-convenient and easy for everyone has had a proportional effect on the ease with which thieves and anarchists can disrupt all our lives. I can’t imagine conmen in the 50s knocking the doors of housewives up and down the land, doffing a trilby and wishfully asking about that ‘accident’ they’d been in recently, or telling them that their mangles need a factory reset or their husbands will have to go to work in crumpled shirts forevermore.

Needless to say I forwarded it unclicked, to the phishing report at Apple, along with the comment.. “‘ben’! Lol”

And that was that.

Unless I really have been locked out of my Apple ID! But I doubt it.