So…
Does Blockbuster have DEBBIE DOES DALLAS
or
The Scrunched-up-nude version of Little Mermaid.
And my mother still swears up and down that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as portrayed in the original film, is true and happened somewhere here in our lovely lone star state. That’s even after being apprised of the connection to Gein, Psycho and Silence of the Lambs, and of course, snopes. As she swears; “It did too take place, uhuh. It did.” :rolleyes:
Yeah, I don’t know why some people take it as such an insult when you point out something is an urban legend to them with supporting documentation from SNOPES.
I’ve been called a ‘party-pooper’, ‘no fun’, what business is it of mine to ‘rain on their parade’.
And it’s not like I shove it in their face with a “nyah-nyah, your wrong, your so gulible!” I usually just reply with a link saying “Check this out…”
And like others of you have already said, I got cut out of their “circle of friends” e-mails for being such a downer.
Whatever dudes. Wanna buy some sweet speakers? Meet me out by the white van.
If the stupidest thing my mom or sister ever did was send me junk emails, I would fall to my knees in utter joyous gratitude.
When my brother got his first computer, he fell prey to the virus hoax, and sent everybody in his address book a frantic message to delete a file from their system. I looked up the filename, and wrote him back, with the link, asking, “If you delete that file, how do you expect to be able to watch Flash animation?” To his credit, he rewrote everyone on the list, apologizing.
I haven’t been so lucky with others. Some of my wife’s relatives are blocked from sending us e-mail. I ask all my friends not to include me in their giant forward list for glurge and other internet crap. If they send it anyway, I remind them that I asked them not to send me that stuff, and explicitly tell them not to do it anymore. Send me a letter. Don’t send me any religious or military glurge, or whatever crap you think is cute, OK? A couple of lifetime friends have stopped communicating with me altogether because of it. Well, if that’s what our friendship has been worth to you guys, fine, fuck ya.
I noticed a disturbing line in a glurge email I received this week.
The email began: “I checked snopes, and this is true…”
Of course, there was no link to the snopes story, and when you actually check snopes, it’s false. I fear the cognitive wall I’m going to run into when I try to explain to family members that you can’t rely on the email’s claim of veracity any more than you can rely on it’s other idiotic claims; you have to actually check yourself.
“But, it says that they checked snopes!”
One of the high muckity mucks at my employer did this, with an email about how the phone companies were going to be selling everyone’s cellphone numbers to telemarketers, so signupnowforthedonotcalllist… That would have been to probably 4,000 people. Dolt.
Yep. It was exactly that one.
My SIL sends me these bullshit forwards with warnings and all kinda of hoaxy and schmaltzy crap in them. When it’s false info, I always send the snopes link to her. She never, ever responds, and I’m sure she doesn’t forward them or correct herself.
Etiquette question: is it rude to do a “reply all” when sending the snopes anti-hoax responses? I don’t do it, I just send them to her. But she sends them to literally 50 people, so I kinda feel bad that I’m not letting those people know they got bad info. OTOH, I don’t want to embarrass the SIL in front of her 50 closest friends who if they don’t forward this message will get 7 years bad luck.
I don’t think it’s rude. SOME one has to correct them. I even have had a few to email me back, thanking me for setting the record straight. The one ‘friend’ who gave all this ‘raining on my parade’ crap has stopped sending me stuff. Sweet, sweet peace 
Fucking BINGO!
Therein lies the problem. “Are you calling me stupid?”
Well, yeah…I guess I am! Y’all connect up to the same “internets” I do. How do you not know where to go to try to make some sense of the bullshit that floods your email every day?
They usually thank me once. When I continually have to set them straight, I’m either raining on their drama parade or sucking all the joy out of their lives.
I find the reactions you all are getting when you debunk these e-mails to be interesting…when we do this with our mom, she just laughs about how naive she is and says ok, ok, I’ll check into it next time before I send them. (Of course, she never does.)
I’m very lucky in that my mom never got on-line, and my sister is an IT security expert. The ONLY time she has sent me glurge it was under the heading of “Can you believe people fall for this crap?”
Toward the end of her life, mom would fuss and fret over every single piece of junk snail-mail she got. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if she had an email account.
I did have a former friend that had my email address. She thought it was a good idea to send free e-greeting cards on every holiday etc. I was polite the first three times I asked her to stop that. The friendship ended when I started forwarding the resultant spam to her with a “thank you very fucking much” heading.
It is your duty to do so.
Each of these e-amils gets huge over time with the list of the addressees. Each copy takes up a certain amount of disk-space. That’s that much more disk space all the ISPs have to pay to make available, and the cost is passed on to the rest of us.
If the e-mail contains pictures, it should be a crime NOT to reply to all. My co-worker sent out a missing kid e-mail, “just in case”. I checked the URL of the fake picture of the little girl. It was being hosted by a site whose domain name screamed “marketer”. So now the log of that server had a list of the valid e-mail addresses of everyone who happened to open that mail, increasing spam, which a recent report has defclared to have double in the past year, and now makes up 91% of all e-mail.
Aah. The little redhead girl.
Well, she’ll be famous until she’s 84, at least. :rolleyes:
I don’t know, maybe I associate with a different demographic, but I have never gotten this kind of glurge from someone I know IRL. Very occasionally from someone on a mailing list or something.
I just got my first one the other day, from my late grandfather’s companion, whom I recently met. So far it’s been just the one. Please Og, keep it that way. She means well and she took care of my grandpa for a long time, but lord, is she a fruitcake.
Yes, I have a friend-a master’s degree holding engineer-who insists on sending all kinds of gooey prayer chain angels love you Og will make a miracle appear in your underwear drawer 5 minutes after you send this shite to 187 people and a big spotted dog.
Then he sent me the Barack Obama is a Muslim email the other day. I attached the Snopes link and commented that since he’s into all of that religious glurge, did he forget the commandment about “bearing false witness”? No reply.
Friend, family, boss; I don’t give a rat’s ass who sends me this crap, I immediately respond along the lines of “don’t ever send me this sort of shit again if you wish to continue to stay in my good graces”. If it’s provably wrong, I give a cite and reply to all. I’ve had some hurt replies, but generally people are completely unaware that they are forwarding glurge, and respond favorably. Those who don’t, well, fuck 'em.