Monday 12 September 2011

Chain Mail


People tend to keep cursing spam email, which is fair.

The last thing you want to see when you go online and open your email inbox are messages about 6 month MBAs from dubious PO Box universities, penis enlargement pills, discounted medication, and links to porn/virus websites. So all the hate directed at spam email is well deserved.

And then there are chain emails, the ones with a pretty useless message and a note at the bottom asking you to forward the email to 10 other people within a time frame, lest something evil befall you and your family. Exasperated anger towards emails like these is well deserved too.

But to those of you who believe that chain mail is a recent phenomena, that came into being soon after the advent of the internet, I'd like to point out that some of us have been silent sufferers of it for far longer.

You see, before there was spam email, there was spam mail. That's right. Paper spam. In envelopes. Delivered to your doorstep.

You opened the envelope. You read the contents on a printed sheet of paper. Telling you how long that particular chain was. And how much more longer you could make it, by making copies and forwarding it to 10 other friends, and adding your name to the list included. How the Prince of Wales was part of the chain, and how you wouldn't want to piss him off by discontinuing the chain, in less direct but equally menacing words.

Into the trash bin those letters went. And nothing ever befell our family except less stress, and perhaps no calls from the Prince of Wales.


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