I’m through with trying to be nice, through with trying to be helpful!
What brought this on? Actually a Pet Peeve, in a way. I have lots of online friends, through the East Texas Writers Association, and Facebook–as well as a couple of other online forums. Seems like every couple of days I get an email forwarded to me–and umpteen others–containing world-changing news, warnings, supposedly important facts, along with the request to forward the same on to as many “friends” as I can so that “…we can change the world…”
I don’t like to forward supposedly helpful emails to other people unless I have checked the message through Snopes.com. If the result shows the message to be true, then I will definitely forward it. However if (as happens in most cases) the information is false, I do not like to waste my time, or take up cyberspace by sending it on to more and more people who will not only believe the message and the incorrect information it contains, but perpetuate it’s existence. I feel strongly that people should not be mislead by false, and sometimes scary, information, and certainly should not be encouraged to waste their time, and the time of additional recipients.
I’ve even had forwarded messages that have declared “This is true, it has been checked by Snopes.com”–and on checking for myself, lo and behold Snopes said, in clear upper case letters, FALSE.
So I check Snopes.com, as I said, and forward if true, and if false I will send a quick response to the sender and sometimes to “all” the sender’s recipients. The last time I did that (today!) I received back a couple of rather nasty responses, to the effect that, if I have nothing better to do but check Snopes.com on everything I receive, then I should “get a life”–another response told me I was being tacky!
So I’m through. In future I will do as one of the responses suggested and simply delete all future forwarded emails–I will not care if the information being passed along is true, false, dangerous, helpful. So what if people blindly accept incorrect facts, believe they will get kidnapped in parking lots asphyxiated by a spray of perfume–I no longer care. Sorry.
But it will be one less email circulating and taking up space in the ether. My time will be saved–let others save their own!
I feel better now–thanks for reading.
Keep Calm and Carry On
Isn’t it great to have some place where you can dump whatever is bugging you. Write on!
Yes, but I really hate to do this with a blog! I should have taken a deep breath and left things alone! Thanks for reading, Gay, I appreciate you.
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