One of the things I love about my job is the way it can draw on all sorts of random skills. Being a person who l0ves to learn things like a magpie loves to pick up shiny objects this means that I am delighted at the opportunity to draw on something from the grab bag of “things what I know”.

This week, it was my rudimentary Spanish which got an outing. A colleague approached me to get my opinion on an email she had received. It looked like it might be spam but it purported to come from a TV company in Uruguay and her group was looking at building up contacts in this area of the world.

A bit of investigation showed that the attached PDF was indeed a file using the portable document format legitimately and not a cover for something nasty. Furthermore, I did a bit of reading round and found out that the show being talked about is a health-related program on Canal U, airing at 2pm on Fridays. I was even able to get the gist of a couple of sites talking about the programme. ¡Muy bien!

There is still the question of whether it falls in the category of unsolicited email but it might have resulted from various stirring her group had been doing. My advice was to check with some people on the ground but, thanks to my Spanish, I was confident that it was at least what it purported to be and not a scattershot front for malware.