Chain Letters, Petitions etc - C'mon people have some common sense!!

[DollFin]

Am I the ONLY person amongst my internet friends and acquaintances who understands that 99.99999% of anything you get via chain letter is probably either a hoax, outdated information, or totally ineffective?? Every day, I will most likely get at least 1 chain letter, petition, missing child alert (Ashley Flores is NOT missing, just for everyone's information!)or other such time and bandwidth wasting garbage from someone whom I would otherwise consider an intelligent, self-sufficient member of society. I have repeatedly sent "reply all" messages to these offenders informing them of the ease and brief time it takes to verify whether something is valid or effective through such websites as snopes.com, but these same people will continue forwarding useless chain letters, convinced they are "just trying to be helpful, just in case it's true!" I will STILL, on occasion, receive the infamous "Disney/Microsoft/AOL etc will give you $10,000, a free cruise, whatever, if you forward this to 20 people within 5 minutes" with the disclaimer "Hey, this is probably not real, but you never know..." Well, guess what, people... in the time it took you to forward that message, you could have actually found out for yourself whether or not it was real and saved a friend's (Mine, for instance) sanity! LOL.

What annoys me most are the false "missing kid" alerts, like Ashley Flores. With all the genuine missing kids out there, it is sad that so much time and effort has gone into perpetuating untrue or outdated cases. Unless you are personally acquainted with the family of a missing child, any chain letter with a missing child alert can and SHOULD be verified before being passed along - it is so easy to do and would not only help the valid cases receive their proper attention, but imagine how the families of kids listed in erroneous alerts must feel when they are constantly seeing their own child listed as missing.

OK, I am done with my rant. I just had to get that out of my system. Thanks!!!

[ScaredSilly]

Urban Legends Reference Pages

[SkuaSeptember]

Ditto!!!!!!

[RnSdiver]

I hate giving a new to the internet friends My email address for just these reasons.

[rox@ucf11]

I get them every so often and rarely ever foreward them

[pyre24]

I always delete chain letters. I hate them.

[Suther2136]

Oh crap I forwarded this to every one I know before I realized it was not another chain letter....LOL

[mitchy]

Now you tell me. I thought I had $10,000 coming my way and just ordered a whack of stuff from ST.

[rfb3]

Originally Posted by DollFin

Am I the ONLY person amongst my internet friends and acquaintances who understands that 99.99999% of anything you get via chain letter is probably either a hoax, outdated information, or totally ineffective??

Nope. My delete key has no paint on it...

[IrishSquid]

I just got one last week that was idiotic. It was titled:
"Soldier's Homecoming! They really know how to do it right in Tennessee!"
There were a bunch of pictures of flag waving, parades, hands over heart, police /fire truck escorts, etc., which is fine by me. What cracked me up was; about 5 pics down, on the side of the street in front of a building, was a sign in the shape of Texas with "Texas State Inspection Station" emblazoned on it. Morons don't even read what they forward.