University of Antarctica

My desk is in the same building as the Post Office.  Any "strange" mail that is received there is passed on to my boss.  Usually, this mail is sent by philatelists hoping to get a cancellation on an envelope for their collections.   Last month; however,  the post office received an interesting looking envelope addressed from Nigeria.  My boss opened the earthy-smelling envelope and pulled out four hand-written applications to the University of Antarctica with passport-sized photographs of the applicants attached.

Now we ALL know that there is no University here in Antarctica, so we had to Google it.  What we discovered surprised all of us.  Someone has gone to enormous lengths to design and publish a VERY detailed and complete faux website for a University that doesn't exist and used our military post office address as the Admissions office address.  It's an ironic twist of fate that Nigerians ended up being the victims of an internet scam.

We used all of the resources at our disposal to discover the identity of the masterful genius behind this farce, but we have only identified who the domain is registered to (a guy who shares a last name with a baker on station who is revealing nothing) and have also found indications that someone in Poland may be involved, as well.

Sadly, the University is way more exciting, enticing, green and interesting than our real lives but we can dream of eating the delicacies served at the campus restaurant, taking classes on the aboriginal people of Antarctica, and strolling in the Botanical Gardens.

Enjoy!  University of Antarctica (UAnt) website

You might be interested to note that one of the Nigerian applicants to the program is interested in studying infant mortality.  I guess we should work on having more (or any) babies.