If the person’s e-mail list is long (about 100 people), I always like to include a mention that 100 people reading an e-mail that takes 3 minutes to read wastes a total of 5 hours of productivity, all with one single click of a button.
At an average of $20 an hour, that person has thrown $100 of opportunity cost out the window. Damn, they really should institute an e-mail tax!
Bite your tongue!
I kept getting glurge from my dad’s friend’s dad for awhile. The only thing was, I didn’t know my dad’s friend’s dad, and I didn’t know that my dad’s friend was a junior. So I’m firing off these replies like “Dude, what the fuck are you sending me this shit for?”, “You’re smarter than that,” “Get your head out of your ass,”…etc. And apparently I’m firing them all off to some 80-something old man. I still have no idea how I got on his email list. It was pretty embarassing though.
THEY’RE INSTITUTING AN E-MAIL TAX! WE HAVE TO START A CHAIN LETTER TO STOP IT!!!111111
Please inform your Mother that the correct terminology is intar-web or internets, but that it is considered improper form to mingle the terms.
Just yesterday I got an email petition with over 200 signatures begging Bush not to appoint pro-lifer Hager to an FDA Advisory committee.
Too bad he was appointed in December 2002, and re-appointed in June of this year. :rolleyes:
I once tried to combat ignorance by sending the snopes link about the “12 days of Christmas is really about the oppressed Catholics remembering their faith” one, and all I got back was “Well, it’s a nice uplifting sentiment, so it’s OK.” No, it’s not nice and uplifting, it’s silly and historically inaccurate. So there!
A success story: we have a friend who likes to send around interesting or inspiring stores (but usually higher quality than email forwards). It only took one time for him to discover and use snopes, and now he’s a genuine fighter of ignorance! I’ve seen him fact-check and debunk several oddball little hoaxes.
Myself I don’t mind the glurge (poems, not-so-funnies etc) because it isn’t misinformation…just usless. I just delete them and no skin off of my nose.
It is the inaccurate or downright false hoaxes that get me steamed and sending people to snopes.
It’s threads like this that make me happy not to have any friends.
I’ve only been trapped in one of these recursive email clusterfucks once; it was the Nieman Marcus/Mrs Fields’ cookie recipe. Someone on an old AOL mail list got it into his head to send it out. I replied to all that it was a hoax, which set off a firestorm of emails. It finally got to the point where I had to threaten to report the next person to send me anything with “cookie recipe” in the subject header to TOS for spamming. Not only got me out of the loop but got me dropped from the email list completely.
Hey, I just got this one too, from my bloody tech mentor at my job. Interesting how many people who should know better get bamboozled by these things. Thanks for the link, as you saved me from having to go find one myself.
Do internet petitions ever work? My impression is that they don’t and there’s no point in forwarding them even if the cause is legitimate, because without addressses and verifying information, all you have is a list of names and cities that could be completely fabricated. Why do people still forward them?
Probably because it makes them feel like they’re doing something important.
My Mother-In-Law used to send along these things, which she would get from my Father-In-Law. I would respond with the appropriate Snopes links. In the last year, she has been sending them directly to me, asking me to “check it out, because it sounds fishy.”
Yesterday morning, she asked for the URL of “that website where you check things out (email truth vs. actual)” . I think we may have a victory on one small front.
Snopes says no. 
Well. Sonofabitch. I had a well thought out and articulate reply in serious commisseration with the OP. I have lost it. I ranted. I thought it was great.
Stupid frackin’ page cannot be displayed thing. :mad:
So here’s the Reader’s Digest version.
I was going to start a Pit thread about this myself just yesterday. I got one of these bogus piece of shit messages in my COMPANY email from a co-worker. It was about an amber alert for a missing kid. This wasn’t just one of those missing kid reports where the kid was found years ago and the message keeps moving on. The story, the kid, all of it, was MADE UP. Never existed. Snopes article was replied to all. Co-worker felt dumb.
My husband and I spend a lot of time in Vegas. My mother once forwarded me the kidney story and a stern admonishment to be verrrrry careful lest I wake up in a bathtub filled with ice and a severe kidney deficiency. She was genuinely worried. I gently pointed out the facts to her and the appropriate snopes article. Now when she gets these, she sends them to me to check out before she forwards them! :rolleyes:
I love my mom, but I’m beginning to question my origins and possible adoption.
I wish people would rub their brain cells together once in a while and use the facts that are so obviously and easily at their disposal. Are they just lazy?
Something like that happened to me yesterday. The receptionist sent around a message that there was – get this – a BMW in the parking lot with the lights on.
I fired back a nasty email with a link to the snopes home page, suggesting that she check these things out before passing them along.
And today, for some reason, the VP of Product Development is mad at ME!
I did that once as well. You’d have thought I sent out a new strain of Anthrax the way people went hysteric on me!
Fortunately I either have smarter friends now or people who don’t care if I make a million or whatever…
Now if the same would work on all the penis and rolex ads I get…
I recently replied to a forwarded piece of shite and attached the Snopes link, suggesting that a quick check precludes jamming inboxes with BS. The sender emailed me back in a huffy tone and said she “didn’t have time to verify the things in her inbox” which makes no sense to me. You’ve got plenty of time to send me something about a non-fucking-existant coupon from Applebees, or something else that if I forward it to all my friends in the next 8 seconds, a local Hooters girl will knock on my back door offering free fellatio, but no time to vet things first?
A college student in my fire company e-group sent out the email regarding Ollie North, Al Gore, and Osama bin Laden. When I sent him the Snopes link noting that Osama wasn’t in the picture then, the person mentioned by Ollie was really Abu Nidal, and that Al Gore wasn’t a member of the committee before whom Oliver North testified, he replied that it was really a political cartoon. At that point, I just told him that if he mailed glurge again, I’d go Moderator Medieval on his young ass.
Well, that depends, are you in the will or not? 
One of my SILs always forwards me the, “Wonderful friend you are, please forward this to everyone you know to show them how much you care.” crap.
Yeah, one of my sisters fell for that one.
