Jeff Taylor
Beware the Chain Email
An Engineer's Life
April / May 2005
Volume 3 Number 2
I'm an engineer. Therefore, I get e-mail. In the beginning, e-mail was intended to be an efficient and productive way to send jokes and funny stories to your friends and co-workers. Every once in a while, you'd get a meeting notice, or perhaps the occasional "policies and procedures" reminder triggered by one of the aforementioned jokes. Ah, the good ol' days. Now it's different. Some dweeb, with a penchant for easy opening cans of reprocessed ham, has gone and hosed it all up!
Human growth hormones, cheating housewife services, septic tank maintenance additives, online degrees and other unmentionables inundate my inbox. Wow, talk about a miracle of marketing! How did they know I needed all this stuff? And, just how did they get my e-mail address? Hmmm ...I don't remember signing up for the Lactose-Intolerant Line-Dancers' weekly newsletter. I suppose it's inevitable—€”The longer you have an address, the more spam you're going to get.
Of all the e-mail evils out there, the worst has to be the chain-e-mail. The chain-e-mail is the lazy man's re-invention of the chain-letter. The chain-letter had some limitations, though. You had to buy a stamp if you wanted to mail it. Stamps are soooo Twentieth Century! Why, the last time I bought a stamp was in Y1.999K! And so was born the chain-e-mail. Just point, click, and annoy. It's just that easy!
Chain-e-mails look innocent enough at first glance:
This is absolutely true. A friend of my sister-in-law's herbalist is a lawyer's neighbor, and he checked it out. Bill Gates made a deal with AOL, Shasta, and Victoria's Secret. For every UPC bar code you get off any aluminum can (not just Shasta cans) and e-mail the code to everybody in your address book, Bill Gates will buy a new, unused empty can from Alcoa, and smash it with the Monster Truck "Grave Digger." Yes, Bill will actually be driving Grave Digger when he smashes the can! Then, the U.S. Postal Service will gather up and distribute the cans to the roadway along their routes. NASA will use earth-imaging satellites to locate the cans, and automatically send text messages to homeless people and civic organizations telling them where can pick up the cans (pre-smashed!) and turn them in to their local recycling center for cash!
Some chain-e-mails end with polite suggestion, "Please don't break the chain. Send this to everyone in your address book." Others are a little more threatening. "Don't break the chain. If you don't send this to 50 people in the next 60 seconds, you'll have bad luck for the next 3 years, your uvula will sprout toenails, and Martha Stewart will be ordered to serve the remainder of her house arrest in the guest wing of your mother's mobile home!" Yikes!
If you believe the particulars in the chain-e-mail, you might be tempted to send it on. Who knows, it might be true. Yeah, right! Like the owner of Grave Digger is gonna' let Bill Gates behind the wheel! On the other hand, if you're not afraid of the Domestic Diva, you might arrogantly delete the message. (What, me worry?)
Either way, it's too late. The real threat has already begun to fester. I know that the sender has my best interests in mind, and cares deeply for my future well being. However, it's those addresses at the end of the "To:" list that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I'm talking about that "bark@ theMailman.co.cz" and "y.i.shoot@randomCars.net." Unknowingly, my dear friend has just set into motion a series of events bent on e-devastation and e-destruction. "Stop.yelling@me.org" sends it to "online.tattoos@discountPrices.yow," who forwards it to "Not2good@math.edu," who hasn't updated his virus definitions lately, which results in it being sent to "everyone@naughtyNannys.net," accompanied by a nasty little trojan horse. Now, all these deviants have my e-mail address! And I wonder why I get spam...
So, as I sift through the megabytes of mortgage refinance offers, gigabytes of gadgets for the bedroom, and terabytes of travel temptations, I try to stay calm. For I know that I've been blessed with a lifetime of good fortune. And, all with a simple click of the "forward" button.
Now, I must run. NASA has just located another can.
Jeff Taylor is an engineer at Applied Technology Associates, Albuquerque.
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