People Who Send on Forwards and Chain E-Mails

Although I have a website (of sorts), a Yahoo! Club and all sorts of Worldwide Web-related paraphernalia, I'm really not a 'Net sort of person. Like most sensible people, to begin with I was instantly enchanted by the concept of the Internet and spent many hours 'surfing the Web', as we newbies called it then. However, for reasons which I have discussed many a time, I rapidly grew disillusioned with the Internet and everything connected with it. My weekly website updates became fortnightly, monthly, and eventually completely discarded any semblance of regularity. My Yahoo! Club would be ignored by me for days, sometimes weeks on end. And, finally, inevitably, I became either too busy or too lazy to reply to e-mails with any sort of punctuality. The upshot of this was, of course, that people tended not to e-mail me very often, knowing that my replies could not be counted upon to arrive anytime soon. This disheartened me a little, as I quite liked receiving e-mails from people but, as the only way to encourage people to e-mail would be to actually REPLY to their e-mails, I deemed the trade-off a necessary one. And so, in return for a relatively quiet life I accepted the prospect of having an Inbox filled only with billing notices from the mercenary bastards at British Telecom and the occasional invitation to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime shares offer. But, mixed in amongst all the turgid nonsense I was daily sent, every now and then I'd discern a recognisable name. "Oooh! An e-mail from someone I KNOW!" I'd say with something approaching vague enthusiasm, "I wonder what it can be?". And then I'd open it. And be confronted with "101 Reasons Why It's Better To Be A Guy Than A Girl". And I'd SCREAM forever.

You see, I just cannot STAND forwards and chain e-mails, and I can't for the LIFE of me understand why people send them on. I mean, have you ever laughed at an e-mail titled "FW: Fw: Fw: Fw: Re: This is fun!!!"? Or been inspired by a chain e-mail containing a poem about drink-driving, or a story about some Mexican guy buying a carton of milk for his neighbour's wife or some other such equally ludicrously improbable tale? I haven't. This leads me onto one of the main problems with chain e-mails.

1) They are written by the sort of people who write chain e-mails.

See, if William Shakespeare had written a chain e-mail it'd probably have been quite good. He'd have sent it to you, you'd have read it, said "Cor! That was a BIT good!" and sent it onto your friends, knowing that they'd like it too. And so Will's important message would touch the hearts of thousands and change the lives of millions, and the world would be a much better place for it.

Unfortunately, William Shakespeare wasn't the sort of person who wrote chain e-mails. That is, he wasn't a spotty American teenager with no friends and nothing to do but sit at a computer all day. He was out there in the real world, mixing it around a bit, writing his plays and sonnets without even the THOUGHT of inflicting them on the world if it chose to ignore them. And if he'd written a REALLY good sonnet about the importance of friendship, and somehow managed to make a wee picture of a teddy-bear out of backslashes, brackets and hyphens to add to the bottom of it, would HE have started sending it out to everyone in the world with the line "ITS NATIONAL FREINDSHIP WEEK!!! SEND THIS TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS AND TO THE PERSON WHO SENT IT TO YOU!" gratuitously tacked on to the bottom? No, no he wouldn't. He'd just have quietly copied it into his manuscript, went about his business in a respectable fashion, and lived and died in shadowy obscurity. So, why, oh WHY do people whose literary talent rarely even approximates to a correct usage of punctuation and grammar feel the need to foist upon us poem after joke after inspirational story? And, more to the point, why do people read these things and actually SEND THEM ON???? Which brings me neatly to my next point.

2) People who send on e-mails are like the people who write them. But with less creativity.

Here's a scenario for you to mull over. Imagine that you're incredibly bored and, as a last resort, decide to go on the Internet and have a look around for some interesting sites. "There are literally MILLIONS of websites out there," you think to yourself, "Each a suppository for varying amounts of information on extremely diverse subjects. Almost every interest I have, no matter how obscure or perverted, shall be catered for on some website or other, and although variations in quality are immense, there is SO much out there that it cannot FAIL to entertain me for the awkward half-hour between "Friends" and "Frasier"! Why, the very beauty of the 'Net is its INCREDIBLE eclecticism! And whilst I am on, I shall check my e-mail. Ooh, one new message downloading! I wonder what it could be......

Why, it's a forward with a big, FUCK-OFF attachment! Which will take forever to download, and shall doubtless turn out to be a collection of pictures of men on bicycles taken at HILARIOUSLY unconventional angles! Ker-CHING! Well, I know what I'LL be doing for the next half-hour! Ah, forwards...... Eases the pain......"

DOES THAT SOUND FUCKING LIKELY TO YOU? Because it certainly DOESN'T to me. Just who ARE these people, that take it upon themselves to inflict their own particular brand of 'entertainment' on the rest of us? They're like the really bad karaoke singers who start belting out "I Will Survive" when you're right in the middle of a pleasant conversation. Only, instead of actually singing THEMSELVES, they play a tape-recording of someone else singing, someone who you've never seen, never heard of, and pray to GOD you'll never meet. Because, if you DID happen to bump into them on your way home one lonely winter night with no witnesses around, and they started telling you a story called "The Boy Who Never Gave Up" or "The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down", your next prayer to God would be a rather lengthy one, involving a fair old bit of explaining on your part. But, most of all, ABOVE ALL about these people, ONE thing gets to me. It's the knowledge that they haven't sent it to me for ANY real reason, other than my presence in their address book. Now, I wouldn't mind half as much if someone read a forward, thought "Ooh! This is the sort of thing Thomas would find funny!" and then sent it on to me, with the best of intentions. But I DO mind when someone says "Ooh! A forward! Another chance to INDESCRIMINATELY inflict upon EVERYONE with whom I have had ANY sort of correspondence in the last 5 years a completely inane and utterly pointless exercise in showing-off!!". Because I'm fairly convinced this is the main reason they do it, you know.

1) To show that they receive forwards, and thus to prove that they have friends.

2) To let everyone on their mailing-list see how big their mailing-list is, and further propogate the myth that they have lots of friends.

And so it is that the rage induced by my finding a forward in my mail is directly proportional to the number of unfortunates who have also had their Inboxes violated in a similar fashion. The message is: there is enough SHITE on the Internet as it is, without the relative sanctity of my mail server becoming a suppository for further pish. Forward-senders, no-one is impressed by your slip-shod attempts to affirm your social circles. For, when all's said and done, anyone who thinks that repeating and rehashing something that wasn't even worth saying in the first place is an adequate substitute for proper human contact needs their head examined. With a baseball bat.