What do you do when you when you see “Fw” or “fwd” in the subject line of an email?  I mean no offense to those who send them, but often times I find myself hitting the trusty old delete button.  Many times it’s simply because others have have forwarded it before (many times over).  Also, there needs to be an email rule that forwards do not count as actual personal emails, so they do not require a response.  It is bad enough that we don’t write a letter, buy a stamp and walk to the mail box, but now we want to send something that someone else wrote and with our two clicks of a mouse we expect a heartfelt personal response of how it changed our lives or at least brightened our day. 

Also, if you are going to forward something, please do a minimal amout of fact checking.  I can remember years before the internet hearing a story about someone finding a scuba diver in the middle of a Washington state forest.  “How did he get there?” you ask.  According to the story, experts in the field of Scuba Diver Discovery concluded that one of the forest-fire fighting helicopters that drop water on forest fires scooped him up while the poor guy was minding his own business searching for seashells in the ocean.  After getting plugged in online years later, that story made its way around the internet world through “forwards.”  It turns out it is what is known as an “urban legend.”  That does not mean it was not a cool story, but I wonder how many scuba divers were keeping an eye to the sky from under the surface for the big scoop of death.  How many people stopped flashing their highbeams at the rude oncoming cars for fear of becoming a victum of a gang initiation?  What about those terrible kidney theives ( I hear they operate like a band of pick-pockets, have you checked your kidneys lately)? 

My recommendation:

1.  Before you forward something that sounds to good/bad/stupid/outlandish/shocking/etc. Check it out on snopes.com.  I don’t know if this sight is always correct, but they have a lot of valuable information on these things.

2.  Learn to clip and paste so that people don’t know that it’s a forward.  Even if it is good/bad/stupid/outlandish/shocking/etc., add some names of people that you know or say that it actually happened to you.  You may even get a heartfelt response.  Just don’t ask me for a kidney.

 PS — Don’t feel bad about me not reading your forwards.  Think of my situation.  I am writing about it in my blog that all of at least four people read!