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Man, I HATE hoax e-mail! I get a lot of it at work. You'd think teachers would know how to check up on this tripe, but many of them are technophobes. It runs the gamut from Coke dissing the Pledge of Allegiance on its cans to Congress taxing us per e-mail sent. I generally look each thing up on Snopes.com, then send a link to the dupe who sent me the hoax. One colleague finally quit sending them to me; he didn't quit sending dumb e-mail, just stopped sending it to ME. Even my dear ole DAD, a computer programmer fer Pete's sake, got sucked in by the one that made him delete a bit of code that he actually needed. What's even sillier is that he sent it to ME, when I have a Mac, and don't possess any of the crap referred to in the e-mail. After I sent him the "it's a hoax" link, he sheepishly admitted that he was struggling with trying to restore what he'd eradicated. He'd also sent the thing to about 200 other people, creating havoc among our elderly family members. Sigh. Today, I got the one about UPS uniforms supposedly purchased on EBay, maybe by "terrorists." It came from a reputable online fabric business. I checked it out--it's an old hoax--then sent them links. I got an embarrassed apology from them, too. I hate to think of how many thousands of nice ladies who sew will now be terrified of the UPS man, and shrilly demand ID, all because of someone's little moment of spectacular irresponsibility. Guess I'll have something to rant about next week when the kids learn about urban legends. Maybe I'll give them a true-false list, where they have to research which ones are real and which are bogus. Might be a good lesson in evaluating the reliability of online siurces, too. Coming up tomorrow: Shakespeare's Birthday! Hooray for the Bard! |
 
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Hoaxes!