Like I Have Time For This?

I got one of THOSE forwards today. You know the ones I mean. The missing kids. The predators waiting just around every corner. The money Bill Gates wants to give me.

Yeah, one of those. Today’s was a missing child alert: some kid named Flores, missing from Philadelphia. I checked it at Snopes, and it’s crap. Of course. So, I’ve deleted it and moved on with my life.

And you should do the same. If you ever get an email that has some sort of scare, or unrealistic prize, or anything that sounds REMOTELY too good (or too bad) to be true, please… I BEG OF YOU WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING… check it with Snopes before you send it to me. Because…

(and I’m just gonna come right out and say it)

sending false forwards is really the equivalent of walking into a formal dinner party with a big giant booger hanging out of your nose.

I’m serious. That’s exactly what it’s like.

Now, we’ve all been there. We’ve all at least once in our lives had to duck beneath a linen table cloth to wipe our noses, and we’ve all been guilty of forwarding an email that was nothing but pure and utter bullshit. There’s no shame in it, okay? We can admit it and move on with our lives.

The last false forward I sent happened about 2 years ago. It was one of the missing child alerts. Some little boy or other. I forget his name, and it doesn’t matter anyway because he wasn’t real. It was a scam. But I saw “missing child – please forward” and that gut-instinct that makes you want to help a missing child kicked right in and I forwarded the message to Everyone In My Address Book within 90 seconds.

Ten minutes later, I received an email back from one of the recipients of my false forward, advising that the missing child message was a scam that had been circulating the Internet for well over a year, and advising me to check out Snopes for more information.

I was mortified. Not just because I’d been duped by a stupid email forward, but also because the man who’d informed me of my stupidity had felt it necessary to click “Reply To All” when he sent me that correction, thereby chastising me for my stupidity in front of everyone else I knew. (Because he’s that kind of asshole, basically.) This was the equivalent of me walking into a dinner party wearing my best gown and diamond earrings and having someone shout from across the room for all to hear: “Good God in Heaven, what the hell is that green glob dangling from your nose!?!?!?”

So, I took my public email-forwarding-humiliation in the best stride I knew how, which was primarily to LEARN from the experience and never send a suspicious forward out again. Which, I have not. Now, I check Snopes faithfully, and she never steers me wrong. I also vowed to be the kind of person who would NOT shout at others publicly when they made similar mistakes. If my good friend walked into a dinner party with something unsavory emerging from a nostril, not only would I tell her immediately, I would tell her PRIVATELY so that No One Else Would Ever Know. Because I’m that kind of nice person, basically.

So, from that point on, whenever I received a suspicious email, I would check it with Snopes, and then reply Only To The Original Sender and let her know that it was quite possible that that particular email was not true, and tell her about this interesting website where things like that were being tracked.  It worked well for a while, until one day about a year ago, I got a forward from someone who was really a friend of a friend. An acquaintence, at best. She sent me the one with the Nine Safety Tips for Women. You know…the one where there are various ways in which a potential rapist could try to snag you and ways to avoid it, the one where number 9 is the trick in which the attacker will play a tape recording of a crying baby outside the front door so that you’ll open the door to look for the distressed baby and he can get you. (Uh, that’s crap too, according to Snopes. So, don’t worry.)

Anyway, she sent that to me and about 600 of her closest email buddies, and I did my usual thing. Replied only to her, and told her as gently as possible that the email alert was a scam and directed her to Snopes. And that’s when I discovered that some people don’t like it when you tell them about the boogers hanging out of their nose. Some people get really angry.

She sent me this unbelievable reply that I wish I had saved. Here’s a paraphrase of what she said (in the iciest, frostiest, most nasty tone an email could ever hope to contain), as best I can remember:

“Dear _______”

“Thanks for the link. But I just want to tell you that the reason I sent that email to everyone in my list was that I don’t always get a chance to send email to everyone and sometimes I want to let people know that I’m thinking about them, so I forward emails to them.”

Now, let’s just think about that for a minute. First of all, to complete my booger-analogy, her response is basically the equivalent of: “Yes, I know there’s a giant booger sticking out of my nose. I left if there just because I was thinking of you. How do you like it?”

Second of all, I think we all need to pause and consider what kind of friend it is that sends you an email that warns of the imminent danger of rape and/or murder, because she was thinking about you. Because if you’re a friend of mine, and you’re thinking of me, I’d really prefer you send me something from Hallmark. Maybe something with flowers on it, or even a GIANT FROG HEAD. Or Hoops & Yoyo. Anything Hoops & Yoyo would be fine. Not some DIRE FALSE WARNING of the imminent, omnipresent danger of mortal attack.

But, for those of you who think that there’s nothing wrong with it, I’d like to suggest the following possible new greeting card line:

It’s got possibilities. But I still prefer Hoops & Yoyo.