I got this glurge today at work. In fact, everybody in the hospital w/email got it. A cow-orker asked me about it and I said, no I’m not going to forward it to anyone. I was then accused of being a heartless person. I sent her the link to the Snopes article. She said, well, it COULD be real. I tried to explain the extreme difficulty in tracking email. She replied with a “Well, you don’t know everything about computers.”
I said, “True, but I do know this is BS.”
She tsk-tsked and walked away.
I sent the Snopes link back to the sender, but never got a reply.
The next glurge email I get will be reported to the sender’s supervisor.
Gotta nip that in the bud. I strongly encourage all the folks working at my company to check Snopes before forwarding stuff like this. And if they fail to check, they get an e-mail with a link to Snopes - forwarded to the entire distribution list so that everyone can see they got snookered.
Unfortunately, there’s little you can do when you present someone with something that’s well researched and accurate and they still choose to believe the BS. If it gets too annoying, maybe you can dig out the company’s official e-mail policy. Does anything in the glurge e-mail (or your co-worker’s forwarding) violate policy?
“True. But at least I know something about computers, whereas you apparently don’t know anything about computers, or you wouldn’t be wasting my time like this.”
I had a coworker say the exact same thing in regards to some variant of the Thousand Dollar Bill. I didn’t bother trying to explain how such things are impossible.
This really fucking gets on my tits. After, what, ten years of mass Internet use with every other email being deemed a hoax, you’d think people would, I dunno, exercise some common sense and be a bit more suspicious and discerning of forwarded glurge, but no.
Stuff like this makes me think we’re fighting a hopeless war against ignorance. People don’t want the fucking truth.
This is why I love our company email policy that explicitly states that the company email is for company related business only. Any other use goes through the whole verbal/written warning/ ane/or may result in loss of email/internet access/ termination disciplinary action business. Very, very few glurgy/urban legend emails get sent and those that do send one never do it again.
Being the policy/procedure/rules/regs sob has its perks.
Passing on glurge is one thing, but when people start up with “It COULD be true” when faced with the facts then shame and humiliation is the only proper response.
Tell her that instead of sending on fake emails in the hopes that someone else will actually send money she should take charge of the office collection for the survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunami. And that she should contribute, at a minimum, 32 cents for each email she forwarded trying to make herself feel like a do-gooder for free. When she takes a pass just mutter “Yeah. I thought so.”
This is what I would have liked to have said to the woman in my anthropology class who was convinced that we could (without the benefit of any drivers, codecs, or hardware) reformat a CD-ROM drive on a 1995 compaq to play DVDs.
I’ve done that at work. It was the glurge that described the guy at his wedding who had taped pictures of his bride screwing the best man. The originator (my cow-orker) was a little put-out for a couple of days, but we’re back to normal now. And she stopped sending me these things, at least.
Who the hell writes this shit in the first place? And what’s the purpose? Is it just to see if people will fall for it? Or was it a made up story in some of those “Make your own urban legend” that then gets spread as one?
