Saturday, November 1, 2008

When you forward an email...

I thought everyone understood this, but I'll say it here to make it clear (and make it rhyme, without fear... oh brother)
When you forward an email laced with the strong sentiments, ideas, machinations, or the pure fantasy & fiction of another person... wait for it.... wait for it.... wait... YOU ENDORSE THE MEANING OF THE MESSAGE!!!!! (unless you're just mocking "WTF! Can you believe this baloney??!")
No do-overs, no "Oh gee I didn't read it, and don't really feel that way", no claiming "I just wanted to know what you thought" (unless you say "hey, what do you think?" - duh).
On any given day there is just so much crap rolling around the interweb, getting copy/pasted, FWD'ed. With the election season there has been a 643% increase in utter bullshit FWD'ed by ignorant friends/relatives (Hey Kev, you have data to back that 643% up? No, it is a comedically-ridiculous ironic assertion designed to make a point).
Sidebar: When you must forward something, absolutely must, life-savingly important must, then for the love of baby Jesus BLIND COPY all those you're sending it to (adult Jesus was a miserable prick & show-off, no matter what you've read). That way you lessen the likelihood of turning all your recipients into a verified list of real-live-recipients for the SPAM-clowns who generated the message in the first place & get copied every time it gets reply-to-all'd.

I honestly cannot recall how many times I've been outraged by the inanity of some message, or some easily identifiable hoax emailed to me by a well-meaning friend/relative (who, until that moment, I thought had at least a single clue), and to this great benefactor of knowledge I'll send a what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you reply, only to get a "oh gosh, I didn't realize what it said/meant...I DON'T think pandas are evil...".
Like THEY say, "you can't un-ring a bell". And while it seems that sometimes the friend/relative may be just an ignorant fool, lately people have taken to just saying outrageous stuff and then claim they were "taken out of context". I for one, call bullshit, and will cast my ballot to vote you off the island.
I know - preacher/choir here, but I had to get it out. It calms down the spiders in my head.

4 comments:

mulderjoe said...

Amen. (choir has been preached to and loves it).

The thing that amazes me is that I still occasionally get emails that end with, "Pass this on to 10 people and good luck will follow". Got one this weekend.

I mean, email has been fairly commonplace for a while, and yet people still seem to get into the whole spam for fun thing.

Usually, I forgive those who just got email and is discovering all this for the first time (my aunt, my retired Polaroid buddy). But really, do you think that the internet gods will seriously strike you down if you don't forward the message to 10 friends?

More than likely, those 10 friends will strike you down faster than the internet charms.

Make sure to pass this post on or viruses will create trojan horse spam that will infect your computer, your TV and you refrigerator.

Kathy said...

My personal favorite email faux pas is when a group of people r dishing/dissing/mocking and some idiot fwds the epistle to the person you're dishing/dissing/mocking.

Thx dwad.

Horroru said...

The worst is when I get an email that contains some sort of urban myth or scam. And it's sad cause they're so friggin obvious...

My best friend in this case is www.snopes.com.

I reply all and send them the link to where their email about how "Bill Gates will send you $1,000.00 if you forward his email" gets debunked.

mulderjoe said...

Yeah! Remember when we worked at Polaroid, HorrorU, and every now and again someone would send along a "warning" against some virus or something?

HorrorU was always the first (me, a close second) to take the wind out of the sender's sails and tell them it was a hoax.