I usually just return the Snopes page to the person, with little or no comment. It sometimes helps. :rolleyes: not always, but occasionally, well rarely, but it has cut down on the junk I get.
I have a very sparce mail box. No more friends, I don’t know why.
Why bother doing anything but ignoring it? People who like glurge like it for the message, not because it’s neccessarily true. All you’re doing is working yourself up over nothing.
While this particular story didn’t happen, I did do that same exercise in a high school religion class (Catholic Schol), and I do still have mine somewhere.
Anyway, since she never says it’s true, she’s probably passing on what she thought was a nice story. If you don’t want to receive bulk e-mail, tell her so politely. If you don’t mind recieving it, then I don’t see the need to say anything at all, since it’s not being passed off as a true story.
Am I missing something here? Everyone’s response seems to indicate that they put this in the category of “never happened”, but the Snopes link provided by Kythereia gives the status of the story itself as “True”, although the one quoted here is heavily edited from the original.
I never, ever pass glurge along. I hate getting them and never pass up the opportunity to debunk as necessary (just debunked a “call #677”, in fact), but the main part of this one isn’t debunkable.
For the most part, I don’t see the benefit for debunking glurge.
Granted, most of the glurge I get these days comes from people whom I know who are new to the internet and think that the stories about little Johnny and his post-card collection are new and moving. I think most internet users above a certain intelligence go through a glurge stage. They usually will grow out of it. (If not, maybe you need a better quality of friend? Huh? Why do you ask what do I do on my Friday nights? I stay in, but what does that have to do with anything?)
If they’re passing on glurge of a dangerous nature - with information that’s just plain wrong or dangerous I’ll send a Snopes link, but that’s it.
My mother was an overachieving middle-school teacher (Louisiana’s Teacher of the Year 1991). At the end of every school year, she would hand write a two-page letter to each student and told them what she liked about them and what they could accomplish with their strengths. She wrote close to 100 letters and it took up a lot of the beginning of the summer.
This was in a poor, rural area and many of the students didn’t turn out that well. There were some that turned out to be robbers, rapists, and murderers. However, I can’t count the number of times that one of her students ran into her and mentioned their special letter even years later. One night she got a call from prison. One of her students doing time for rape was able to make a phone call and he picked her to talk to. They became pen-pals after that.
If the story in the OP isn’t true, it could be and it contains a powerful, true message. It certainly doesn’t rank with most glurge out there.
As glurge goes, this is one that actually doesn’t bother me nearly as much as some.
Lately, unfortunately, I’ve been inundated with glurge of the cute-puppies-kittens-flowers-you’re-so-special type of crap. It’s sent mostly by a sweet elderly lady I know who is, unfortunately, a cute-puppies-kittens-flowers-adorable-grandchildren person. The glurge is so sticky sweet it makes my teeth hurt, but I don’t have it in me to tell her to stop sending it. So I just send it to trash and try to think no more of it.
The idiot who keeps putting me on his list for his reactionary political crap, however, I write and politely tell him that I’m simply too busy for extra emails. And he actually does remove me from his list. For a while. (I’m listkeeper another list with him wherre I do actually need to receive mails from him, or he’d go to my permanently blocked list, as apparently he has with many others on the list.) He seems to have about a three-month memory span; then it’s rinse and repeat. I wonder if he’s ever figured out WHY most of the people he knows won’t accept email from him any more? :wally
When my mom died, I had several friends send sappy glurge. I know their intentions were good so I just ignored them.
However, if I get another “swifter wet jet causes cancer in family pets” I think I’m gonna hurl. When I get one of those, I “Reply to All” with the Snopes link so fast your head will spin.
