On Bob Servant

On Bob Servant

An email!

Could I, the author writes, take a look at his newly-published book and give it a mention on these pages if I like it?

Yes. Yes I could.

So, after I finished being sick with laughter, I finally get round to writing a review.

The book: Delete This At Your Peril, the tale of one man's fearless exchanges with internet spammers.

The man: Bob Servant, 62-year-old former window cleaner, king of the Dundee cheeseburger vans, gigolo, man of the sea and avid collector of jazz mags.

His victims: Some evil bastard sitting behind a computer terminal somewhere in Lagos, who deserves everything they get.

In a correspondence kindly edited for idiocy and checked for downright lies by his good friend Neil Forsyth, Bob takes on and roundly beats the scammers at their own game, turning the offer of a dead African king's $75m fortune into a doomed business plan to take delivery of a set of talking lions:

Bob,
This is urgent. What is hapening?? I don’t sell animals. I only said I could get some lions to help you. Then you say you need a leopard and I say ok. Now you are saying the lion has to talk? What is this madness? Send me the £1700 that we agreed imeediately.

Jack,
What does the lion say when it talks? I am just checking that it won’t get me into any fights.

Then there's the unfortunate episode where the offer of becoming the official money laundering agent of a non-existent company becomes the building of a legal defence over sticking a vacuum cleaner pipe up the postman's bottom...

There are, of course, sites all over the internet where fearless users take on spammers and have the time of their lives running them up the garden path and back again. The difference here is that it's actually funny. Laugh out loud funny, in fact. While some fake Russian bride ("My God, what a pair of bazookas") is trying to extract shed-loads of cash from our hero, he is out buying her an ostrich as a present and stringing her along with the tale of his attempts to get Champion home on the bus.

You may catch up with more of the genius of Bob Servant at his own high-quality website, and you can do the old fella a favour by purchasing his excellent book from one of many good bookstores. Or, just send him the money, because he'll only go back to window cleaning to fund his jazz mag collection.

So: Scoring this book on the Robot Wars scale for style, control, damage and aggression, this book is judged: EXCELLENT.

In fact, on our own Scaryduckworth-Lewis method of rating stuff for excellence, we'd even go as far as giving this one a coveted 19: Nigella Lawson whipping up a creamy sauce".

So mote it be.

Amazon: Delete This at Your Peril by Bob Servant