How many times?

Everytime, without exception, I have my students to sign up for an e-mail address, I tell them to not sign up to receive "free offers" because it's just junk mail. Nothing of any use. Total garbage. I also tell them to ignore all pop-up ads that offer deals too good to be true, like the "Click here to receive a FREE DVD player!!" or "Guess which one is Brad Pitt and win a digital camera!!"

But do they listen? No.

I had one student who kept referring stuff to me. She'd click on some pop-up, then it'd ask her to list 5 friends' e-mails, so NATURALLY she asks me. And when I tell her that I'm not interested in getting more junk mail (who doesn't), she starts sucking her teeth, griping that I won't help her get a free digital camera. The best part is how she realizes that she has my e-mail address on handouts I've given the class, so she finds it and puts it down.

Then when I ask her why she's sending me all this junk mail (it has her e-mail listed as the sender), she denies it. When I show her the e-mail, she "suddenly remembers" that she might have put me down on her form. When I ask her if she received ANY of the things she's "won", of course, complains how "somebody must have messed it up for her", because it was a "sure thing".

I feel like bombing her e-mail account.

Another student complained about how she had received 25 junk e-mails in one day. "How could this happen?" I laughed. When she asked why I was laughing, I explained to her that she signed up for it. That she should have listened to me when I said not to select those "free offers". She said "But I wanted to find cheap plane tickets! Ok, I'll just go back and uncheck them. I can do that right?" I replied "Sure, as long as you have a time machine and you uncheck them it when you signed up for your account." You should have seen her two weeks later when she was getting upwards of 50 pieces of spam a day. After that, she just gave in and signed up for a new account.

In cases like this when students don't listen, I secretly like spam.