I do so hate getting rid of my family and friends, but there are times when this fanciful thought crosses my mind. Like this morning, as my well-meaning but misguided father forwarded yet one more e-mail that he failed to check out.
So, today’s Chicken Little warning pretty much told me not to buy Glade Air Fresheners (plug-in type), or my children, my husband and myself would die horrible, fiery deaths as our house would burst into an orgasm of incendiary madness about us, with little left behind to identify the culprit but two tiny prongs in an electrical outlet.
And, of course, there was the emotional guilt required at the end of the e-mail to encourage me to waste other people’s time as mine had been wasted. These guilt trips just irk me all the more, for the feeling that someone is trying to manipulate my emotions in addition to insulting my intelligence.
Our society requires a certain amount of responsibility when doing certain things: driving cars, raising children, cooking food, etc. I am held responsible if my bookkeeping doesn’t conform to certain requirements: that it be accurate, timely, and auditable, for example. If I yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, I may be held liable for any economic and physical damage that may ensue from such a sophomoric act. Why then, do so many get away with insisting that their cyber friends must be as lazy and as gullible as they are? The anonymity of the internet allows all sorts of things to occur that our normal society would never allow. If I were to stand on a street corner with a sandwich board proclaiming that McDonalds had HIV infested syringes or snakes in the ball pits of their children’s play areas, I am sure that McDonalds would come after me with all the force allowed by law for ruining their good name. I know for a fact that an ad slandering Proctor & Gamble as a satanic organization would result in impending bankruptcy – on my part.
Who sits around and creates these things, these urban legends and internet hoaxes? I can only imagine some frustrated baker who has this killer recipe for chocolate chip cookies and wants to be sure everyone has it in their kitchens. “I know!” she exclaims, “I’ll put my recipe on the internet, and just to make sure that everyone looks at it, I’ll make up a story where I’m an underdog battling big, bad Neiman-Marcus Stores. Everyone hates large corporations, so they’ll be more than willing to spread my recipe everywhere in order to get back and them!” And the housewife plops herself down and creates her fabrication to get her cookie recipe out. Unfortunately, Neiman-Marcus must now spend untold amounts of time and money trying to convince people that this event never happened. Of course, the original chocolate chip recipe has been replaced by many recipes over the years, as people replace the original recipe with their own favorite oatmeal or sugar cookie recipes before sending it on through the wires to the next group of unsuspecting dupes.
Or maybe, it’s just someone who wants attention, but is afraid of getting in trouble. The internet is perfect for just such situations. I could send out an e-mail, claiming to have gotten it from an anonymous source, and waiting to see the trouble it could cause. How many people can I make lose sleep? How much consternation can I cause? For example, there is an urban legend on the internet that drinking bleach can help one overcome a drug test (“cleaning” the urine). This is dangerous as well as malicious.
The people who forward these falsehoods mean well, I am sure. If I thought a friend of mine was facing dire danger, I would want to warn him as well. But because it is so easy, so incredibly simple, to hit the “forward” button on the e-mail screen, they don’t take the time to make sure that the stories are true. It is easier to waste other people’s time and energy than their own, and who will blame them for the costs associated with the lie? If these self-same people were required to stand before a court of law with a hand on the Bible and proclaim these same statements that are sent so blithely through the internet, how many would escape a perjury punishment? And could they be held liable for a friend’s rape or death because the victim took on full faith the information about “how to fight off a rapist” that was sent to them by the afore mentioned “friend”? How many of these e-mails would stop, or at least be checked out?
Yesterday I had to correct an e-mail (for the second or third time, I believe) that declared that inputting your PIN number backwards into your ATM machine would alert the police that you were in trouble. Not the financial kind, like forgetting to get enough cash to take out that hot chickie-poo waiting eagerly in the car, but the kind where someone with a gun was forcing you to withdraw your life savings in $300 increments. I can only imagine myself at the ATM, desperately punching in backwards PIN numbers, hoping the police show up and confident that they will, because I was told by a very good friend who was told by another good friend who was on someone’s e-mail list, who got has it on good authority from a cousin who thought she read somewhere on the internet that this was true. And as I wait for the police, the robber takes my money and shoots me dead. And as I lay dying, I rage at the fact that the police didn’t get there in time. In fact the police won’t arrive until my rigid body is discovered in the cold of the morning, and they wonder why I didn’t run away or fight for my life instead of allowing myself to be taken hostage. It happened because it was on the internet, and of course, that makes it true.
With all the websites available to check out the veracity of these claims, it is inexcusable that the senders don’t avail themselves of this information. As I’ve told several of my friends who insist that I avoid all the dangers of pay phones and fake state troopers, the following items in an e-mail automatically get my antenna up:
1) WARNING WARNING! The sky is falling…or some such nonsense. If it’s a warning, I go check it out before I start changing my lifestyle or habits. I have learned that I do not need to check my toilet for the sneaky and dangerous “butt spider,” thank goodness!
2) “This (insert authority figure here) states this is true!” This could be anything from a government agency, TV show, firefighter, insurance agent, or doctor. Even if the (insert authority figure here) actually exists, their names can easily be borrowed to lend an air of truthfulness to the story.
3) If there are too many details – yeah, the same as number 2. After reading enough of these things, I can pretty much tell when someone’s trying to feed me a load of BS rather than delectable chocolate cake. Actually, it’s almost every one of these. If e-mails could be converted to the fertilizer that they are, my gardens would be incredibly green.
4) “I’ve checked this out on Snopes, and it’s true!” I’ve seen this one a couple of times. Yes, it may be on www.snopes.com, one of the most popular anti-hoax websites. Each time I’ve seen this, the threat may be mentioned, but it’s either (1) old and outdated, (2) not as severe as the e-mail tries to tell me, or (3)some other important item that is left out of the original e-mail.
5) An urgent demand that this message be sent to all of your friends, family members, religious community, old school chums, and all of their relatives, living and dead, as well as their pets. This is usually couched as an emotional guilt trip; for example, “Send this on to everyone you know. It could save their life!” A variation of this is the religious implication attached to usually more friendly e-mails, to wit: “If you love Jesus, you will send this to seventy-seven of your best friends RIGHT NOW!” And then there is the tease: “Send this to twenty-five of your inner circle right now and you will see a cute surprise!” All of these are despicable methods of trying to get you to waste internet bandwidth to make you feel better.
If I’ve offended anyone, I’m not terribly apologetic, because it probably means that you are one of those well-meaning family members or friends who just insist on believing everything that is sent to you. Or maybe you just want to send me all of these meaningless but infuriating e-mails on the off-chance that it MIGHT be true, but you just don’t want to take the time to check it out yourself. Well I’m tired of being everyone’s gatekeeper. You are tired of my sending out “reply all” messages to everyone you send to, pointing out the fact that you have, in some fact, lied to them all. Just do us all a favor, and quit sending these stories out. Then I can get more work done, and so can you, and the urban legends creators can get real, meaningful jobs. This sounds harsh, but then God had to knock Saul off his horse and blind him for three days to get his attention, too. (THAT is not an urban legend, by the way – it comes from the Bible.)
Speaking of work…did you hear about the man who died at his desk and wasn’t discovered for five whole days? Well, there’s a reason for that! Now, back to work!