You know what’s Crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!
People who believe their full time job is to forward email.
We all know these people. We are all on the list.
The list is comprised of friends and acquaintances. The list is made up of work mates and anonymous names from countries near and far.
Dot this. Net that. @info, @comcast, @bellsouth.
Sending mass emails around the globe is easier than picking your nose, and it’s about as rewarding.
If you email program is like mine, it dings a weird little ding when email arrives.
If your email is like mine it dings all damn day long.
DING! DING! DING!
You are now free to roam around the internet.
The problem is, you don’t know what the hell the email is. It could be your boss sending you that thing he needs done. It could be an important PDF file that’s integral to the presentation you are working on.
So you have to stop what you are doing and open up the email.
And there it is.
A video from the Lawrence Welk Show from 1964. Or perhaps it’s a picture of a cat playing a banjo. Maybe it’s a mime wiping mustard on his chest. Maybe it’s a joke; “hey did you hear the one about the priest the rabbi and the midget who went into the bar?”
ARRRGH!
Are you freaking kidding me? If i want drunk midget jokes, I’ll google drunk midgets and see what I get.
Ding!
Oh look, another political cartoon that offends at least half the people who receive it.
Ding!
I all ready saw that skunk suckling at the teet of the reindeer. It was cute the first 2 times I saw it. Thanks for sending it, SVEN, or whoever the hell you are at: IDON’TKNOWWHOTHEHELLYOUARE.COM
Sometimes the file is so large, your computer freezes when you try and delete it. The program belches as if it inhaled cat hair. Everything stops for a moment and you suddenly start trying to remember if you saved the project you diminished to open up this stupid email in the first place. If you have the patience of a water bug, which is about where I am on the evolutionary scale, you can barely wait for the computer to clear its memory banks of this stupid forwarded email. If you are like me, you start banging escape and delete and enter and many buttons at once, like a Chimpanzee cracking coconuts.
Suddenly the INSERT button pops off your keyboard.
“DAMN!”
“That wasn’t too bright,” you mutter to yourself.
Usually, after a few moments, your computer begins flickering with signs of life, sort of like Amy Winehouse waking up from a bubble bath full of qualudes and tequila.
I am not from Jupiter. I mean, sometimes the forwarded emails are worth noting.
A video that makes you laugh, or a patriotic picture that makes you salute the fact that you are free to enjoy a moment like this. But sadly, more times than not, the forwarded email is a long and winding story wound in political bias and one sided farsical misconceptions.
We’ve all received the life in 1950 Vs. 2009, right?
Family values this and kids did that and father knows best B.S. Maybe it was better, because there were no freaking junk emails to deal with.
My question is this. I barely have enough time to get my job done. So who are these email forwarders and where do they get all this time to search the internet and click and paste and redirect and send and delete.
WHO HAS THIS KIND OF TIME?
And if they do have this kind of time, how stupid is their boss for letting them spend their time forwarding emails.
It’s like a slovenly domino effect. The person who sends the email takes time to send the emails. The person who gets the unsolicited emails has to stop what they are doing and deal with the junk email.
Either way productivity is lost.
No wonder we haven’t built a better mouse trap.
We’re too busy reading about priests and midgets and sombrero wearing cats in bars.
Now equate this productivity drop off to a global equation. Sven in Sweden. Paco in Mexico. Nanook in Iceland. Everybody is connected and everyone is having to stop making shoes, spearing fish, and writing the next great Novel, to answer that damn DING!
Look, serial forwarder, do me a favor. You want to send me a note to say hey there, or I was thinking of you or whatever, then feel free.
But if you want to send me some impersonal crap that some dude named Nanook is also getting, then do me a favor; leave me off the list.
Please.
And that’s crazy.