Trip Like I Do

I Hate Forwarded Email

November 14, 2007

I got one of those “Stop!  Read This!!  This is very important!!!!!!!”  emails the other day.  It had a really disturbing picture of a woman’s breast in it.  I don’t normally get bothered by these things, but this picture actually made me physically nauseous.  It was something about how you always need to wash brand new underwear because some lady went to South America and came back with a bizarre rash, that wasn’t a rash!!!! OMG!!!!!

Of course, the first thing I did was to head on over to Snopes to check out the validity of this forwarded email.  The email was an urban legend and the photo included was a fake.  I was pretty sure that was the case, but I wanted that validity.  I then replied back to everyone who got it that it was a fake and gave the address for Snopes, so hopefully these people might realize that all of this crap that comes into their mailboxes isn’t real.

I don’t get these types of emails very often, but I always wonder about the people who come up with this stuff.  I mean what is the purpose of these types of inflammatory chain letters?  Is the purpose to incite fear in the people who get them – so that they are a bit more mistrusting of the world around them?  Or is it some kind of test to find out how easy it is to fool people?

I don’t know, but I just spent the last hour reading about all kinds of tales at snopes.com.  Whoops.

Filed under: Rantin' and Ravin'