Monday, May 16, 2011

Thanks for wiping your booger on me.

The company I work for is relatively small (but growing), so there's a lot that's done in big corporations that's not done there, and vice-versa. Generally, this is a very good thing, but there's a habit which persists in emails amongst a handful of ladies in my department that baffles me endlessly: the communal booger-wiping of must-forward feel-good emails which admonish the receiver to forward to at least 12 friends in the next 12 minutes or risk 12 months of bad luck, or some variation thereon.

If you delete after reading .... you'll spend a year of ill luck!


Seriously?

Forward this to 12 friends, and I'd better be one of them.

So, you're going to take it personally if I'm not a) forwarding your chain email and b) sending proof of same back to you?

My favorite is the ones which start off with:

You'll have bad luck if you do not forward this after reading.

Oh really? Best not to read it, then. *DELETE*

Gosh, I don't mean to be a stick-in-the-mud. I am really busy, but I am delighted by clever emails and funny things my friends send me in my personal email. Videos, jokes and quirky things from the web delight me, obviously. But the things that MUST be passed along to ensure that ills not befall me? Gosh, I'm so not down with that.

Anyway, I wonder how long that will be tolerated at my job? I hope they don't think I'm rude or anti-social for not playing along, and I'm certainly not going to complain about it to anyone at the company, but I do marvel that so many people are comfortable cluttering up their colleagues' day like that. Every once in a while, someone in the department will forward something genuinely funny that sort of lightens the mood and I'm all for that. But emails involving magical thinking that prosperity may only be ensured by forwarding something not of their own composition are baffling, to say the least...

5 comments:

Auntie J said...

Oh, I can't stand those things! The ones I *really* hate are the "You'll make Jesus sad if you don't forward this." Somehow, I think, that's hardly the point of my faith....

In an interesting twist, I occasionally get forwards of stuff like that from my best friend, asking me what on EARTH is actually shown in the dumb thing. Now, that's funny, because then we sit and laugh over the fact that her office still doesn't get it that she is blind and can't see picture-based emails. You'd think the big yellow dog in harness that goes with her everywhere would give them a clue. Especially since she's been working there a good seven years or so now.

Barbara Bruederlin said...

I cannot stand getting those smarmy directives to forward emails in order to change my life. And this is on my own personal email. It's outrageous to be sent such drek on work email.

Old NFO said...

Meh... I just delete that crap and move on...

Jon said...

There are few things that piss me off more than someone trying to peddle guilt.

Kristophr said...

I send a spam complaint to the IT department.