Open Letter To All Forwarders

Dear people who send me forwards,

While I enjoy the occasional chuckle at the latest viral video, picture, joke or story, and you please make sure that the thing you are sending is something that I might actually enjoy.

If you don’t know if I’ll enjoy it enough, you don’t know me well enough to be flooding my inbox, so please stop.

However, if you’re one of those people who instantly forwards anything even slightly ‘amusing’ to everyone in your address book, I’m sorry, but I must ask you to go fashion yourself a tinfoil hat, and stick your head in a microwave. Also, please bear in mind that I’m also in plenty of other people’s address books, other people who are probably in your address book also. This means that when we get two or three of you together, I end up getting multiple copies of the same thing.

Considering this is usually comic gold such as a fat woman in a thong, or a picture of a startled cat, I can only assume you’ve had a sense-of-humor-ectomy.

However, I do enjoy lowest common denominator entertainment, so the actual ‘funny’ forwards, I can usually excuse.

However, the next person to email me with a forward that does one of the following, will be receiving a visit from a certain employee of mine named ‘Big Samson’, who will come to your house and do all sorts of fun things to your kneecaps with a rusty boat-hook:

1. Virus alerts with complete instructions on the file you have to look for and remove in order to ‘fix’ your computer.

No, you complete tool. What this email is, is a very poor attempt to fool dumb people into destroying their own computer. Why go to the trouble of actually writing a virus that will be blasted by a free and easy to install virus checker, when you can just tell the terminally stupid to delete a necessary file? So go into your Windows folder if you feel like it, and delete every file ending in dll if you feel like it, you’ll be doing us a favor.

1. Emails purporting to be a technology test from Microsoft/Apple or some other corporate entity with more money than God, who ask you to forward the email to as many people as you can, in exchange for cash.

Bill Gates will NOT personally send you a check for $10 for every person it gets forwarded to. You can’t ‘track’ emails like that. I don’t care if your brother’s uncle’s sister’s pet dog’s former roommate did it and got a huge check. It isn’t real. If you don’t believe me, do the math. If I forward this email to 10 people, then they forward it to 10 people…10 steps later that email will have reached 100,000,000,000 people. If you can’t be bothered counting the zeros, that’s one hundred billion people. It’s the same reason pyramid schemes don’t work. $10 per email means that Microsoft would have to spend one thousand billion to cover the ‘project’.

An awful lot of money to test a bit of software, eh? Even for Microsoft.

1. Warnings that amount to really old and recycled urban myths.

I got one of these recently, and it was an email ‘reporting’ the old chestnut of someone going to a party, getting drugged, and waking up in a bathtub with both their kidneys missing. Ask yourself a question, if someone wants your kidneys, are they going to bother using surgical precision and dumping you in a bathtub? Or just kill you outright, so you can’t tell anyone who they look like? Ignore any email that starts “This is 100% completely true, this actually happened.” If they need to convince you, it’s a lie. You don’t see stories in the newspapers that say “This is 100% true! Honest!” do you?


That is all.