+ Stop Sending Me Shit

Is it just me, or do forwards really just annoy the crap out of you? Here's my beef - you come home from a long day, right? You sit down at the computer to check to see if you've got anything important... and you've got 70 e-mails in your box. Half of them are junk and the other half are... well, junk, but in a different sense. FORWARDS. Here is why forwards annoy me:

Forwards take up space in your account, for one. It's a waste of my precious few moments of time to open a dumb, useless forward. Simple, right?

How about the false promises? If you send this e-mail to 23423423 people within the next 0.123 seconds, you'll be immortal. Your crush will fall into your lap and you'll get married in 234 hours. You'll become rich. Famous. Etc. Let me tell you something. Your crush will NOT CALL chances are, he or she doesn't know you exist and wouldn't call you if paid. Stop clinging to false hope. You won't get 100,000 dollars, and you're not going to see a cute little dog walk across your screen. Don't be so gullible.

Then there are the guilt trips. A little girl or boy in Asbeckastan or some other unheard of country is supposedly dying of some rare disease and if you send this on, a penny will be sent for each person you annoy to research this disease. Even if there was some sick kid, he or she probably died in 1990 when the stupid e-mail first began to circulate. Or maybe Bill Gates is searching for a cure for cancer (nevermind that he's a money-grubbing jackass) and will give you a free new version of Windows, which I wouldn't want anyway, or 10,000,000 dollars or some crap like that for every 100 people you send the e-mail to. Then there's 'if you're my friend send this back, and if I don't get it, I'll take the hint'. My personal favorite, though - if you love Jesus, you'll pass it on. If I love Jesus, I won't send it on and annoy my friends who have better things to do than read fluffy e-mails that give you warm fuzzy feelings. We have lives, people. Jesus will not stop loving you if you don't forward an e-mail, and just because I don't waste my time sending a stupid e-mail back doesn't mean I'm not your friend. You're an idiot if you think friendship relies on a lame forward.

What is up with 'if you don't send this e-mail on to 20 people you'll have bad luck in your love life forever'? I have bad luck anyway - what the heck is some e-mail gonna do to make it worse? How about 'this chain e-mail started in 1897' - nevermind the fact that the internet didn't exist in 1897, send it on or else you'll keel over dead by some bizzare occurance like a piano falling on your head.

Have I covered them all? Not quite. There are still your 'I love you, I'm your friend, blah blah blah'. That's cute. It would have been anyway, IF I hadn't gotten the same e-mail from 23423 other people in the last ten minutes! You don't love me, most likely. You probably don't know me. If you're my friend, be my friend... don't annoy me with stupid e-mails. Sheesh. The best thing a friend can do is protect their friends from annoying, crappy e-mails by not forwarding them.

There is no such thing as a valid online petition, by the way. There is no form of ID because it's online, so they do no good. Don't waste my time sending them to me. Don't be suckered into thinking that MSN or AOL are doing some outrageous thing, or that there is some evil virus and you need to go download a file to protect yourself from it. Use common sense, people. Hotmail would not send a forward to get a message across. They have all the hotmail addresses - they don't need to pass a forward on. Same with aol.

Pass this on. Don't forward it, but tell people to stop sending you retarded junk mail. You will not lose all your hair and have no love life. You will not see the Taco Bell dog dance across the screen. There is no reward for passing the message - you won't get 10 cents a person or save a dying child's life. You'll only get the satisfaction of knowing you may be preventing yourself from becoming a forward victim in the future. No promises - you will die... eventually, but not for some reason having to do with sending or not sending an e-mail. In conclusion: Stop sending me shit or I will be forced to stab you in the eye.

Get me out of here!