Good Morning Readers ! First of all, for those of you that care...aka maybe 2.5 of you, I was drafted to the Violent Femmes of the North Star Roller Girls two nights ago. They are awesome, and I'm super excited. Its hard to tell since I am not a big fan of exclamation marks or smiley faces, but you should know, on the inside, I'm jumping up and down like a fat kid at Fat Kid Camp during the 5 minute warm up before he gets winded and has to take a break. So if you ever wander into the Minneapolis Convention Center and happen upon me in underwear and roller skates, make sure you are wearing a red handkerchief in your pocket or a red feather in your hat or I wont talk to you.
Recently, I have noticed an upswing of chain email letter thingies--from here on out referred to as C.E.s--appearing in both my work & personal email Inboxes. I have also noticed an upswing in my urge to knock over anthills and push papers off my coworkers desks. I don't think this is a coincidence. The emails I have been receiving vary in content, but all have the same basic message: send this out to 5-15 other people within the next hour or your house will burn down and your husband will leave you and your dog will get kidnapped and your bank account will be hacked into by the Chinese Mafia--- I picked an Asian mafia because they are much better with computers than than the Italian Mafia. Obviously. Anyways, if you don't do whatever the email says you are supposed to do, horrible things are supposed to happen. So because I keep getting these, I have come up with some questions I would like answers to in regards to these trashfests in my inbox. Begin.
1) What if my life already really sucks? What happens then?
2) Why do people who claim to be my friends send C.E. to me? That would be the equivalent of me sending you a beautifully wrapped box full of fire ants with a note stating that if you don't immediately dump the contents of the box down your pants, some bad shit is going to go down. I wont tell you exactly what bad shit, but I'll give you a few random examples of friends of friends who didn't in fact dump the ants down their pants and are now all in comas....That's what it feels like for me to open a C.E. from you, spend 10 minutes reading to the bottom only to find out you are essentially threatening my life if I don't spread this garbage to my entire contact list like you did.
3) Why do these C.E. usually have a nice message somewhere in them, that becomes void after the last 3 sentences? Most C.E. contain a paragraph or poem about wanting to remember how short life is, or remembering to tell the people you love that you do, or some other such sentiment. And overall, I think these are good things to be reminded of on occasion. But the second I get to the line "If you do not send this to...." I automatically discredit everything that came before that sentence as filth and lies.
4) Who starts these C.E.? And whats does the person get out of making hundreds of people forward crap to other hundreds of people that the creator doesn't know? I do not understand. Its not like Im sending thank you notes back to the creator "OMG thank you soooooooo much, that chain email you sent me last week totally changed my life!!!! I got picked for the next Bachelorette and my lap band surgery was approved all in the same day!! Best. Email. Ever!!!!!! Hugs & Kisses ~Maria" No. That doesnt happen. So why create something that can never be attributed to you, and you will never get praise or critisim for? Don't you dare tell me it's art or a form of expression. Because I will slap you right in the crotch. It's not. C.E.s are created by stupid people with lots of free time on their hands who happen to have access to an email account and a list of contacts. End of story.
5) Why is the person who creates these C.E. at about a 4th grade writing and reading comprehension level? Grammatical errors, spelling errors, and an overall lack of creativity accompanies every god damn one of these things. Why? Its called spell check. Even FB has it. If something is underlined in red,it means you spelled it wrong. Please take the time to fix these errors before sending out an email that is going to be viewed by potentially hundreds of people.
5a) To speak more to the general crappiness of the writing, I just received a C.E. with the following sentence in it "Kate Bellford received this email last week, and marked it as Spam. The next night, on her way to a masquerade ball, she was hit by a drunk driver and died instantly". .....I'm not fucking kidding. That was one of the examples. Masquerade Ball? Was this email originally drafted in 1735? WTF? This is 2010. How hard would it have been to say "was on her way to a club" or "was on her way to the grocery store". Really. Masquerade Ball. I'm going to assume her horse and carriage were totaled in the accident. Its amazing the drunk driver survived too--they always do! Have you seen what a deer can do to a car? Imagine a full horse. And how do we know she received this email last week? Did we hack into her account after the funeral? That's rather inappropriate. See? Terrible writing. Just terrible.
6) Why do I have a 3 second moment of panic when I delete a C.E? I'm not superstitious, but after having read all the various ways and brilliantly drafted examples of the bad things that could happen to me once I hit the backspace key--shut it my computer doesn't have a delete key. It was made in North Korea--it kind of gets under my skin, and I have a brief lapse in judgment where I think, shit, maybe I should send it out. But I never do. And I'm still here, and have only 2 and a half prosthetic limbs to date, so the jokes on you C.E. creator, HA!
7) Why are C.E.s still being created? I feel like they should have fallen off the same time that AIM and Myspace died. It doesn't make sense. We are supposed to be evolving. Not regressing back to a puritanical though processes of acting out of fear to avoid punishment from an unseen god or karma. Its embarrassing. You hear that? You are being embarrassing. So just knock it off.
In conclusion, No one should be forwarding or creating these anymore. They aren't cool. They aren't funny. They aren't clever. At least I haven't received any that are. So unless it is actually hilarious, or has a video of a one legged dog climbing a staircase, or has a link to a coupon that will save me $5 on my order of $40 or more at Big Bowl, please for the love of god, do not keep sending these things to me. Or I will throw your child and/or pet off a cliff. A high one. With lots of pointy rocks and shark invested water at the bottom.
Have a splendid weekend. Dont blow away in the wind.
yay- I finally found a typo! Shark infested waters, not shark invested waters.
ReplyDeleteyesss.... I win, 1 to nothing!