Don't Be So Forward

Dear You,

When my email has the subject heading RE: I am on guard. Usually it's just a REPLY from a correspondent about something I've sent, but too often it's one of those dreary FORWARDS.

You know what I mean, I'm sure. Opened, the message contains block after block of email addresses of others who have received the thing, and when I finally get to the actual contents, it is something (a) I've probably been sent before, (b) really stupid, (c) really sappy, (d) really obnoxious, or (e) all of those. It's getting so that I feel about the people sending me this stuff the way I once felt for people who said "between my brother and I" or couldn't pronounce "dour" or "err" the proper way. Superior. (Okay, snobbishly and arrogantly so.)

The worse are those emails clearly wrong. I just got the one about the photographs taken at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. These were from negatives found in "a Kodak box camera found recently in a sailor's locker and still in amazing condition." This gifted photographer was, it seems, everywhere in that area, including in a plane, judging from some of the shots. Also in the future, since one of the ships he recorded wasn't built until a few years after that event.

How did I know this was another hoax, begun by someone with wayyyy too much time on his (probably) hands and forwarded by dozens of unthinking (okay, perhaps well-meaning . . .) people before it reached me? Well, Postman wrote that an education is supposed to give people a "built-in crap detector." When I get stuff like this, mine goes off. Loudly. And I open Snopes.com and type a few of the words from the message into the search box. Voila!

It's crap. As I thought. And my next action is to delete it. I don't think it does much good. It won't be long before someone else forwards it to me for my enjoyment.

In Cyberspace what goes around gets around and around and around. Endlessly.