Moans and confessions

It's a while since I had a good moan about the things people leave outside my house (See If I Were JayDax Almighty) but today there was something new.

I live on a main road and just outside my house is a small lay-by (US: 'lay-by' = 'roadside parking spot'). It seems to be a favourite spot to clear their cars of the rubbish they gather in them. Every few days I go out and clear the grass of the stuff people throw there.

It's 22 miles to the nearest MuckDonalds, but that seems to be just the right distance for people to eat their fries and drink their shake. presumably it either takes longer or shorter to eat their burger because I never find the empty wrappers for them.

Despite it being illegal to drink and drive in the UK, I always find a few empty beer cans.

Soda bottles and empty crisp (chips) packets I get by the sackful.

Each day there are five to ten empty cigarette packets. I always wonder why smokers seem to think that they are not litter.

Every week or so I collect a used diaper - If I'm lucky it's wrapped up.

I could have gathered a fair collection of CDs (some even play but definitely not the one chewed by a dog). I've found two mobile phones, both broken. One DVD player - also broken. A black and white portable TV - which still worked and even had charged batteries.

And today's new item? A packet of four Viagra which brings me to the confession bit.

Expect me to confess I need Viagra? Not me! I may be ancient but I've not had that problem (yet). My confession is that once I built a website for a person selling Viagra and other prescription drugs online. You know - the sort of site that spammers try to send you to today.

We built the site back in 1998 soon after Viagra became available. At the time I'd never heard of it. I was asked to research it and make a website to sell it. Now at that time spam wasn't a big problem so I didn't see anything wrong in making the website. Apparently many people in the US didn't want to go to their doctor to talk about this nasty little problem they had so on-line sites sprang up where you could fill in a questionnaire. A doctor (we had a real one in California) would look over your answers and write you a prescription. The pharmacy would then send you Viagra (again the real stuff) anonymously. The site lasted about a year before the state of California decided it was against the law to sell the stuff in California online and prosecuted it's owner.

Would I do it again today? No way! Anyone buying Viagra online has to be some sort of fool because:

• there's no guarantee that you'll get the real stuff - apparently it's often faked
• it's invariably promoted by spam and I hate spam!
• giving your credit card details to a spammer is just asking for trouble.
• you really would be better getting checked out by a doctor who can do blood tests and check blood pressure e.t.c.

OK moan and confession over. You can go back to whatever you were doing. Oh - one last thing. The doctor we used a picture of sure gets around. The same picture was used in 2010 as part of a National Front campaign in the UK.