What is the matter with some people? Intelligent, adult women who run their own businesses, manage jobs and children, are allowed on the road with a large motor vehicle, who forward these stupid emails. And not just to a few friends, but to every mailing list they are part of?
Can you tell I’ve been moderating emails? If these women are so gullible that they believe the *677 rapist story, and the perfume story, why aren’t they gullible enough to believe me when I tell them this stuff is bullshit?
Instead of responding to these things in an educational way, I should just have a no tolerance policy and dump them all.
The second I see more than 5 addresses on the mail list, it goes into the bucket.
I usually just reply to the sender with a link to the snopes.com refutation of that particular rumor. If I’m feeling snarky, I include a note that I never pass along anything I can easily confirm to be a false rumor, and I’d like to think my friends would have the same courtesy.
I have a cousin who sends me these wild stories and bizarre pictures, all of them hoaxes. I keep refering him to snopes, but he, like so many, never learns. With all the readily available resources, you’d think otherwise intelligent people would find out for themselves before circulating these things. Sigh. Reminds me of the line from Broadcast News, where William Hurt (?) asks Holly Hunter (sarcastically)if it’s hard for her to be the smartest person in the room, to which she replies breathlessly, “You have no idea!” (or words to that effect.)
Clearly I need to see Broadcast News.
I used to send people to Snopes, butI’ve given up trying to educate my friends. I just delete without reading and smile stupidly when they ask me about the email later on.
Or, as the engraving in my library exclaims, a no “toleration” policy.