Fast Forwarding
I’m wearing my best Andy Rooney grimace as I write this. I’ve been practicing for quite some time to become a full time curmudgeon in my later years. My wife says I am well on my way. For instance, did you ever notice how annoying email can be? I’m not talking about spam – you know, those in-box entries with subject lines like “Re: On Cough at Inshore Ethyl” (actual spam email title). No, I’m talking about email from well-meaning family and friends that just ends up annoying the heck out of you – almost like they were really there.
I have a relative who recently retired and has taken up full-time residence in front of his computer. He is now doing more forwarding than Yellow Freight. There’s nothing wrong with forwarding emails. We all receive interesting or amusing forwarded email. But the irritating part is finding the forwarded message embedded about eight layers down in the email ‘thread’. I open the email in Outlook (or Outlook Express), only to find that I have to open a second email, and a third, and a fourth, etc. By the time I come to the message, I’m so annoyed that I’ve lost interest in it. I’ve tried to tell him that he does not need to forward the top level message and keep adding to the embedded layers. He can forward from the point of the pertinent message. And oh by the way, go ahead and delete the original list of 28 recipients we never heard of, as they just add to the clutter. Better yet, copy and paste the content of the pertinent message into a new email message.
Next to embedded emails, my next biggest gripe has to do with the long row of indent characters heading each line of many forwarded emails. There is an option (which I do not use, and which I encourage you to turn off) in Outlook and Outlook Express that says to indent each line of an original message in a reply. The default is to prefix each line with the ‘greater-than’ character (>). As these messages weave their way through multiple forwardings, they can acquire a long line of preceding indent characters, which can make the message very hard to read. In my cranky view of the world, they should be removed before sending a message further down the pike. Hallmark has made famous the tag line “When you care enough to send the very best.” In my opinion, if I’m going to take up your time by forwarding an email message to you, it is incumbent upon me to clean it up before sending it on. And so, before I forward a message ridden with napping Vs, I will first run it through Mr. Ed’s Email Stripper. This is a free html program that you can find here: http://www.mistered.us/stripper/index.shtml - there are many other similar programs available if you find the word ‘stripper’ disquieting. Using copy and paste, you copy the contents of the original email into an ‘in-box’ in Mr. Ed’s program, click on a box that says ‘Strip It’, and a second box displays the email message without the indent characters. You can then copy the contents of that box into a new email message, or as I prefer to do, into my word processor, where I fix line wraps and incorrect spacing. From there I copy the content into the new outbound email message. If that sounds like too much fussing around, then maybe the email was not worth forwarding in the first place. As my dad use to tell me when I was growing up, if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.
Something that is not worth forwarding is an Urban Legend. One website defines an ‘Urban Legend’ as “a short tale that is told and retold as true, although it usually has little or no basis in reality or can't be confirmed one way or another.” Typically these messages tell you to send them on to everyone you know, so that they end up spreading faster than a rumor at a church picnic. An example is the one about Congress debating a law which would tax all email at a nickel a piece in order to subsidize the post office for lost revenue. Whenever I get something like this, if it sounds the least bit suspicious, I check it against any of several resources on the web which describe and debunk such misinformation. You can Google on ‘Urban Legends’ to find several such sites, www.snopes.com being just one of them. If I find the message to be untrue, I reply back to the sender and all other recipients, telling to cease and desist spreading the message. I usually throw in a plea to please, please check one of the urban legend websites before forwarding such things in the future.
And speaking of ‘sending to everyone you know’, there’s another one of my pet peeves. How often do you get a message with good wishes or encouragement or perhaps some poetry, and at the end it tells you to send it on to ten other people and return it to the sender so they’ll know that you’re their friend or share their belief. As soon as I see that directive to forward it on or send it back, ZAP, the email is deleted. I refuse to be a link in an electronic chain letter. Besides, such emails rely on implied guilt, and I don’t need any more of that. I’m still working off the supply I got from the nuns in grade school many years ago.
>>>>>If you find yourself identifying with any of these email annoyances, send a copy of this article to everyone you know. And then send a nickel to the post office.