Time waster or worse?

A curious email was sitting at the top of my mail box when I took a look this morning, part of which is snapped above, suggesting that I had used my credit card to spend some money with Wyndham Destinations of South Carolina. Another was sitting in my promotions box, apparently inviting me and my partner to a sales session there for timeshare. There is usually a carrot attached to such things but I couldn't find it. On the other hand, there was a lot of small print suggesting hard sell.

The company exists (reference 1) and does indeed appear to be a timeshare operation, albeit one that I have never heard of until now.

The resort exists, to the extent of having an Irish bar. So it must be OK. And it does appear to have a very fine beach if the snaps offered by gmaps are anything to go by,

Next stop my bank account, where they do not exist, at least not yet. I try talking to the HSBC chatbot - which has involved a helpful real person in the past - but which was a complete waste of time this morning.

At the time in question, late yesterday evening, I was trying to buy tickets from ENO and their computer was behaving very oddly, but I put that down to sloppy IT rather than anything worse. And I have now printed off the tickets. So hopefully no connection.

Maybe I just get rid of the emails and forget about it.

PS 1: in need of a bit of light reading the other day, I plucked a random volume of Agatha off its shelf. 'Crooked House' I managed well enough, with the poor, rather flat quality of the words obscured by the story which seemed to carry one along well enough, words notwithstanding. But the second of the two stories, 'Passenger to Frankfurt', I gave up on. The story was just too preposterous. An unsuccessful take on a James Bond novel. The book claims that the story was written in 1930, but Wikipedia says 1970, when Agatha was 80: so maybe Simenon had the right idea, packing it in when he was 70.

PS 2: there is talk, in the story which I gave up on, of orators who can hold their audience spell bound while not actually saying much at all. The power of personality was the thing, not what was said. Hitler being said to be an example of same. Professional speakers at management training courses and corporate hug-ins being another, of which I have some first-hand experience. You are entertained at the time, but wonder afterwards about the value-add. Can writers pull off the same sort of trick with the written word rather than the spoken word?

References

Reference 1: https://www.wyndhamdestinations.com/.