To Send, or NOT to Send...

If someone mailed you a letter with some information in it, and told you to repackage it and send it to 50 or 60 of your closest friends, and have them do the same, would you run right down to the post office, buy 60 stamps and envelopes, make 60 copies of the letter and send it to your friends? No ? Then how come if someone sends you an email... with the same information in it, you just plop that sucker down and send it to everybody you know, and don't even take the time to see if the information is POSSIBLE -- let known true -- before you send it on ?

Well, without going into all the OTHER stuff I could say about this, I want to point out that I believe we have a responsibility to forward information is true and accurate and for the public good, but I FEEL we also have a greater responsibility NOT to pass on information that is untrue, or that propagates hatred, distrust, paranoia and negativism.

This is just my thing ! If you receive it in an email, and it's NEGATIVE and/or it's ALARMIST and it has a huge EMOTIONAL APPEAL... and it's UNSUBSTANTIATED definitively within the message... there's about 99% chance... its' a hoax, and many hoaxes have been going around for YEARS, just rewritten and modified and resent.

How do you know??? Yeah, good point. So let's pass it on JUST IN CASE! Right? Ugh...

Here's one tip. To check on possible hoaxes and unfounded rumors, I use a source called SNOPES (http://www.snopes.com ) who's mission is basically to debunk rumors, hoaxes and urban legends, and there is a high possibility that the critical email you just received telling you that the world is ending, is a hoax and if you go to SNOPES, chances are you'll get an education AND save yourself some embarrassment if you check it out at least there first. Just go to SNOPES, type the "hoax" in their search box and see what comes up. Everything from missing children, to the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe, to Bill Gates paying pennies per email sent, to... "Oh they stole my kidney and put me in a tub of ice..." You'll find it here. CHECK IT OUT before you forward these emails.

Email makes it too easy to spread rumors, proganda and hatred, and ignorance. Like my friend Dr. Charles Jarvis said, "People don't think; they think they think !" If an email "gets you going"... the first thing to do is see if it's true, and if nothing comes up on SNOPES and nothing comes up on a general Google search, then it's probably false. Dump it! and refuse to contribute to the world's escalating high blood pressure problem.

Eh? And if it's true, but passing it on is not going to positively benefit the people you're passing it on to... DUMP IT! and find something positive to pass on to your world. Okay? Okay...

Now... Did you hear the one about the new Fountain of Youth Drug that's been discovered ? The manufacturer is sending a free life-time supply to anyone under the age of 60 who checks SNOPES within 20 minutes of reading this blog posting? You don't even have to contact them; they'll just glean your mailing address from your browser when you go to the site! AND they'll send you a Neiman Marcus cookie recipe !!! I heard it. My next door neighbor's cousin, works with a guy who shared the inside scoop... confidentially of course, and he's already 10 years younger. It's even been on Oprah, they say. Didn't you see it?

Have an awesome day.

I Hate Email !

Man... email! Do you have any idea how much time I WASTE using email? I am wholeheartedly convinced that if it weren't for email, I'd be rich by now!

It's a weakness. Man, I come home, walk in the door and go to the basement to turn on the the computer, then I go back upstairs to hang my coat up and maybe go to the bathroom, if I need to, check mail, look for water leaks...whatever.

I'm on the computer all hours of the night, I get 300 spam emails a day, easy! between about 7 email addresses! I use the stuff for business and pleasure and speculation and communication. Heck I even get emails about the emails I get!

If it weren't for email, the albums would be finished, the pictures and frames would be hung, the wallpaper would be down and that ugly wallpaper would be gone, along with that ugly hurricane lampish chandelier type thing, the rest of the house would be painted, the carpets would be shampoo'd, all my clothes would be put away and I'd PROBABLY be skinnier! because I wouldn't be sitting in this darned chair stairing at this compu-beast. Viruses? Oh my gosh... sofware downloads? Newsletters, info-mercials, advertisements, new found wealth solicitations from New Guinnea and a thousand other places. JUNK!

Jokes? Holy smokes. JOKES? There's 95 people on my joke list and half of them send stuff back, and half of those have stuff to look at attached to the email other than just the email! and then there's the CD club news and I HAVE to check out the new CDs, the magazine subscriptions the airlines solicitations and... then... the IMPORTANT emails -- business clients who want products and services delivered or finished or.... worse.. people who want me to love the house (and my computer) and get away from email !!! Are they nuts?

Email is probably the worst thing that has EVER happened to me -- bar none; it's an illness and an obsession unto it's own... and it sucks the life right out of you.. Man... my fingers hurt.. I answered about 75 emails just this afternoon not counting the ones I handled at work today. Email.... wow... how'd THAT happen ?

Oh.. gotta go... I got more (e)mail...

I Love email...

I've got to tell you that I *love* email -- and the internet.

When I think of ALLL the things I can do with email, it just excites me tremendously! (no... get your mind back here....) I can communicate with friends all of the world; I can say hi without bugging you and you can get to it when you time and I'm not intruding. I can send you my thoughts across the word instantly instead of waiting several days. I can receive updates from news services or new articles I'm interested in, updates on my financial accounts, pay my bills, check status on flights when friends or loved ones are flying, have the stuff sent to my cell phone, even!

I can send jokes to hundreds of friends simultaneously, send and receipt business correspondence at the speed of electricity, market my products and services, send love letters to special friends. keep in contact with my children who I wouldn't hear from otherwise.

I can use it for work, send proposals, receive proposal and holy smokes you can even send and receive MONEY using little old email, and yet... if you don't use it or need it, it can sit quietly by and awake your bidding. Email is awesome... probably one of the best things that has ever happened to me.

Enough... by George... is Enough!

OKAY! I give! I thought I could do it all, hear it all, read it all, respond to it all and catalog it all. I want to be smart, cute, healthy, loveable, popular and rich just like EVERYBODY ELSE, but you know what? All this email stuff has GOT to go !!! There only so much STUFF I can wade through and read and act on and...well you get the picture. SO part of my 2007 clean-up is DUMPING a whole bunch of these informative emails I get every week (day?) and restrict myself to the stuff I am actually motivated to do something about.

Make sense to you? Here's a test!

• If you have FOLDERS AND FOLDERS of really important emails you never get a chance to read...
• If you find your self hitting the delete button more often than the "read" button
• If you've got a couple of thousand emails in your inbox and you don't have a clue when you're going to get around to checking them out?
• You passed! Find the handy dandy unsubscribe button on a couple of those puppies and CLICK THIS! and stop them from flooding your mail box.
  

If you REALLY get the urge to catch up, mosey on over to their web site and check out their archives and read them there. And if you find that you're not moseying over... then obviously it wasn't important anyway, especially if you're still eating, breathing, walking, talking and your zits haven't increased for having cancelled them. Eh?

Whew... I feel better already.

Have a great year !!!