Do You Forward Chain E-Mails?
Read more articles on Life's Nuances and Let Me Share With You.December 5, 2007
Posted by Karen Amato Schwartz
December 5, 2007
Posted by Karen Amato Schwartz
235 Views
The other day I wrote and wondered here about who comes up with line dances that sweep across the world. Today I’m pondering the same thing about chain emails.
Do you get many of those? You know, “Send this to x amount of people and see what happens”, with rewards that range from seeing a funny image to getting love back…today’s form of the old chain letter.
I don’t get a huge amount, but personally, I don’t like the guilt I feel when I do. If I don’t pass the email on, I feel like I’m letting down the hundred or so before me who kept it afloat, and if I would send it out (I think I may have done so twice a the most) I’d begrudge the time spent doing so, and feel like I’m bothering the recipients. Such a dilemma…
Now, I have forwarded interesting pieces to people who I believe would be entertained or appreciative of the information, but those emails didn’t have a long list of recipients from around the globe. And I would never respond to anything saying it needed to be sent to a group of people in the next 8 minutes, even if the prospect was good luck, good news, and/or money beyond my wildest dreams.
I would love to know where this stuff starts. And how in the world does it keep getting forwarded? Do people really think that sending an email along its merry way will change their lives for the better?
My former boss would send me those emails at least twice a month, and it wasn’t easy to let on that I deleted all of them, pronto. Then a friend included me on some kind of recipe chain. (Those of you who follow me regularly can guess my take on that!) Again, I didn’t have the heart to say that I was not interested in typing up even one recipe, let alone the 5 or 6 this electronic cookbook demanded.
This is one more aspect of life that I just don’t get. Does some lone individual with a lot of time on their hands sit down and do this, or do you think it’s part of some larger marketing plan to get email addresses for spam? (I can see why people try to avoid that prospect like the plague and have been writing their name with the phrase “dot com” instead of using punctuation…)
Some of those are clever, others are really funny, and many are written quite well. If only they would leave it to the whims of those who come across them to decide whether to forward or not…Adding the condition of saying to send it to 10 of your closest buds ASAP is like getting a gift, and then being told you must follow 16 different steps in its care and upkeep because you happened to have opened it.
Let me put this out there to all of you: if you have ever answered one of these emails promising wonderful, unbelievable results if only you’d pass it on, and you did so, only to have an amazing occurrence fall into your lap, send me the story. I’ll recap it and post it here, anonymously. Think of it as doing a service to the Compendium community!
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